The Serpent's Tale Read online

  “Rosamund Clifford?” Mansur asked Gyltha.

  “You know her, you heathen. Fair Rosamund as they sing about—the king’s pet fancy. Lots of songs about Fair Rosamund.”

  That Rosamund. Adelia remembered hearing the ha’penny minstrels on market days, and their songs—some romantic, most of them bawdy.

  If he’s dragged me here to involve me in the circumstances of a loose woman ...

  Then she reminded herself that she, too, must now be numbered among the world’s loose women.

  “So she’ve near been murdered, has she?” Gyltha said, happily. “Per’aps Queen Eleanor done it. Tried to get her out of the way, like. Green jealous of Rosamund, Eleanor is.”

  “The songs say that as well, do they?” Adelia asked.

  “That they do.” Gyltha considered. “No, now I think on’t, can’t be the queen as done it; last I heard, the king had her in prison.”

  The mighty and their activities were another country, in another country. By the time reports of what they were up to reached the fens, they had achieved the romance and remoteness of myth, nothing to do with real people, and less than nothing compared to a river flooding or cows dead from the murrain or, in Adelia’s case, the birth of a baby.

  Once, it had been different. During the war of Stephen and Matilda, news of their comings and goings was vital, so you could know in advance— and hopefully escape—whichever king’s, queen’s, or baron’s army was likely to come trampling your crops. Since much of the trampling had taken place in the fens, Gyltha had then been as aware of politics as any.

  But out of that terrible time had emerged a Plantagenet ruler like a king from a fairy tale, establishing peace, law, and prosperity in England. If there were wars, they took place abroad, blessed be the Mother of God.

  The wife Henry brought with him to the throne had also stepped out of a fairy tale—a highly colored one. Here was no shy virgin princess; Eleanor was the greatest heiress in Europe, a radiant personality who’d ruled her Duchy of Aquitaine in her own right before wedding the meek and pious King Louis of France—a man who’d bored her so much that the marriage had ended in divorce. At which point nineteen-year-old Henry Plantagenet had stepped forward to woo the beautiful thirty-year-old Eleanor and marry her, thus taking over her vast estates and making himself ruler of a greater area of France than that belonging to its resentful King Louis.

  The stories about Eleanor were legion and scandalous: She’d accompanied Louis on crusade with a bare-breasted company of Amazons; she’d slept with her uncle Raymond, Prince of Anti-och; she’d done this, done that ...

  But if her new English subjects expected to be entertained by more naughty exploits, they were disappointed. For the next decade or so, Eleanor faded quietly into the background, doing her queenly and wifely duty by providing Henry with five sons and three daughters.

  As was expected of a healthy king, Henry had other children by other women—what ruler did not?—but Eleanor seemed to take them in her stride, even having young Geoffrey, one of her husband’s bastards by a prostitute, brought up with the legitimate children in the royal court.

  A happy marriage, then, as marriages went.

  Until ...

  What had caused the rift in the lute? The advent of Rosamund, young, lovely, the highest-born of Henry’s women? His affair with her became legendary, a matter for song; he adored her, called her Rosa Mundi, Rose of all the World, had tucked her away in a tower near his hunting lodge at Woodstock and enclosed it in a labyrinth so that nobody else should find the way through ...

  Poor Eleanor was in her fifties now, unable to bear any more children. Had menopausal jealousy caused her rage? Because rage there must certainly have been for her to goad her eldest son, Young Henry, into rebellion against his father. Queens had died for much less. In fact, it was a wonder her husband hadn’t executed her instead of condemning her to a not uncomfortable imprisonment.

  Well, delightful as it was to speculate on these things, they were all a long way away. Whatever sins had led to Queen Eleanor’s imprisonment, they had been committed in Aquitaine, or Anjou, or the Vexin, one of those foreign places over which the Plantagenet royal family also ruled. Most English people weren’t sure in what manner the queen had offended; certainly Gyltha was not. She didn’t care much. Neither did Adelia.

  There was a sudden shout from the bedroom. “It’s here? She’s brought it here?” Now down to his tunic, a man who looked younger and thinner but still very large stood in the doorway, staring around him. He loped to the basket on the table. “My God,” he said, “my God.”

  You dare, Adelia thought, you dare ask whose it is. But the bishop was staring downward with the awe of Pharaoh’s daughter glimpsing baby Moses in the reeds. “Is this him? My God, he looks just like me.”

  “She,” Gyltha said. “She looks just like you.” How typical of church gossips, Adelia thought viciously, that they would be quick to tell him she’d had his baby without mentioning its sex.

  “A daughter.” Rowley scooped up the child and held her high. The baby blinked from sleep and then crowed with him. “Any fool can have a son,” he said. “It takes a man to conceive a daughter.”

  That’s why I loved him.

  “Who’s her daddy’s little moppet, then,” he was saying, “who’s got eyes like cornflowers, so she has—yes, she has—just like her daddy’s. And teenyweeny toes. Yumm, yumm, yumm. Does she like that? Yes, she does.”

  Adelia was helplessly aware of Father Paton regarding the scene. She wanted to tell Rowley he was giving himself away; this delight was not episcopal. But presumably a secretary was privy to all his master’s secrets—and it was too late now, anyway.

  The bishop looked up. “Is she going to be bald? Or will this fuzz on her head grow? What’s her name?”

  “Allie,” Gyltha said.

  “Ali?”

  “Almeisan.” Adelia spoke for the first time, reluctantly. “Mansur named her. Almeisan is a star.”

  “An Arab name.”

  “Why not?” She was ready to attack. “Arabs taught the world astronomy. It’s a beautiful name, it means the shining one.”

  “I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful. It’s just that I would have called her Ariadne.”

  “Well, you weren’t there,” Adelia said nastily. Ariadne had been his private name for her. The two of them had met on the same road, and at the same time that she’d encountered Prior Geoffrey. Although they hadn’t known it then, they were also on the same errand; Rowley Picot was ostensibly one of King Henry’s tax collectors but privately had been clandestinely ordered by his royal master to find the beast that was killing Cambridgeshire’s children and thereby damaging the royal revenue. Willy-nilly, the two of them had found themselves following clues together. Like Ariadne, she had led him to the beast’s lair. Like Theseus, he had rescued her from it.

  And then, like Theseus, abandoned her.

  She knew she was being unfair; he’d asked— begged—her to marry him, but by this time he’d earned the king’s approbation and was earmarked for an advancement that needed a wife devoted to him, their children, his estates—a conventional English chatelaine, not a woman who neither would nor could give up her duty to the living and dead.

  What she couldn’t forgive him for was doing what she’d told him to do: leave her, go away, forget, take up the king’s offer of a rich bishopric.

  God torment him, he might have written.

  “Well,” she said, “you’ve seen her, and now we are leaving.”

  “Are we?” This was Gyltha. “In’t we going to stay for supper?”

  “No.” She had been looking for insult from the first and had found it. “If someone has attempted to harm this Rosamund Clifford, I am sorry for it, but it is nothing to do with me.”

  She crossed the room to take the baby from him. It brought them close so that she could smell the incense from the Mass he’d celebrated clinging to him, infecting their child with it. His eyes weren
’t Rowley’s anymore, they were those of a bishop, very tired—he’d traveled hard from Oxford—and very grave.

  “Not even if it means civil war?” he said.

  The pork was sent back so that the smell of it should not offend Dr. Mansur’s nose and dietary law, but there were lampreys and pike in aspic, four different kinds of duck, veal in blancmange, a crisp, golden polonaise of bread, a sufficiency for twenty, and—whether it displeased Mohammedan nostrils or not—enough wine for twenty more, served in beautiful cameo-cut glass bowls.

  Once it had all been placed on the board, the servants were sent from the room. Father Paton was allowed to remain. From the straw under the table came the crunch of a dog with a bone.

  “He had to imprison her,” Rowley said of his king and Queen Eleanor. “She was encouraging the Young King to rebel against his father.”

  “Never understood that,” Gyltha said, chewing a leg of duck. “Not why Henry had his boy crowned king along of him, I mean. Old King and Young King ruling at the same time. Bound to cause trouble.”

  “Henry’d just been very ill,” Rowley told her. “He wanted to make sure of a peaceful succession if he died—he didn’t want a recurrence of another Stephen and Matilda war.”

  Gyltha shuddered. “Nor we don’t, neither.”

  It was a strange dinner. Bishop Rowley was being forced to put his case to a Cambridgeshire housekeeper and an Arab because the woman he needed to solve it would not look at him. Adelia sat silent and unresponsive, eating very little.

  He’s a different creature, there’s nothing of the man I knew. Damn him, how was it so easy for him to stop loving me?

  The secretary, disregarded by everybody, ate like a man with hollow legs, though his eyes were always on his master, as if watching for further unepiscopal behavior.

  The bishop explained the circumstances that had brought him hurrying from Oxford, part of his diocese, and tomorrow would take him to Normandy to search out the king and tell him, before anybody else did, that Rosamund Clifford, most beloved of all the royal mistresses, had been fed poisonous mushrooms.

  “Mushrooms?” Gyltha asked. “Could’ve been mischance, then. Tricky things, mushrooms, you got to be careful.”

  “It was deliberate,” the bishop said. “Believe me, Gyltha, this was not an accident. She became very ill. It was why they called me to Wormhold, to her sickbed; they didn’t think she’d recover. Thanks to the mercy of Christ, she did, but the king will wish to know the identity of the poisoner, and I want, I have, to assure him that his favorite investigator is looking into the matter ...” He remembered to bow to Mansur, who bowed back. “Along with his assistant.” A bow to Adelia.

  She was relieved that he was maintaining the fiction in front of Father Paton that it was Mansur who possessed the necessary skills for such an investigation—not her. He had betrayed himself to a charge of immorality by saying that Allie was his, but he was protecting her from the much more serious charge of witchcraft.

  Gyltha, enjoying her role as interrogator, said, “Can’t’ve been the queen sent her them mushrooms, can it? Her being in chains and all?”

  “I wish she had been in bloody chains.” Rowley was Rowley again for a moment, furious and making his secretary blink. “The blasted woman escaped. Two weeks ago.”

  “Deary dear,” Gyltha said.

  “Deary dear indeed, and was last seen heading for England, which, in everybody’s opinion bar mine, would give her time to poison a dozen of Henry’s whores.”

  He leaned across the table to Adelia, sweeping a space between them, spilling his wine bowl and hers. “You know him, you know his temper. You’ve seen him out of control. He loves Rosamund, truly loves her. Suppose he shouts for Eleanor’s death like he shouted for Becket’s? He won’t mean it, but there’s always some bastard with a reason to respond who’ll say he’s doing it on the king’s orders, like they did with Becket. And if their mother’s executed, all the boys will rise up against their father like a tide of shit.”

  He sat back in his chair. “Civil war? It’ll be here, everywhere. Stephen and Matilda will be nothing to it.”

  Mansur put his hand protectively on Gyltha’s shoulder. The silence was turbulent, as if from noiseless battle and dumbed shrieks of the dying. The ghost of a murdered archbishop rose up from the stones of Canterbury and stalked the room.

  Father Paton was staring from face to face, puzzled that his bishop should be addressing the doctor’s assistant with such vehemence, and not the doctor.

  “Did she do it?” Adelia asked at last.

  “No.” Rowley wiped some grease off his sleeve with a napkin, and replenished his bowl.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not Eleanor. I know her.”

  Does he? Undoubtedly, there was tender regard between queen and bishop; when Eleanor and Henry’s firstborn son had died at the age of three, Eleanor had wanted the child’s sword taken to Jerusalem so that, in death, little William might be regarded as a holy crusader. It was Rowley who’d made the terrible journey and lain the tiny sword on the high altar—so of course Eleanor looked on Rowley kindly.

  But like everything else in royal matters, it was King Henry who’d arranged it, Henry who’d given Rowley his orders, Henry who’d received the intelligence of what was going on in the Holy Land that Rowley’d brought back with him. Oh, yes, Rowley Picot had been more the king’s agent than the queen’s sword carrier.

  But still claiming special knowledge of Eleanor’s character, the bishop added, “Face-to-face, she’d tear Rosamund’s throat out ... but not poison. It’s not her style.”

  Adelia nodded. She said in Arabic, “I still don’t see what you want of me. I am a doctor to the dead ...”

  “You have a logical mind,” the bishop said, also in Arabic. “You see things others don’t. Who saved the Jews from the accusation of child murder last year? Who found the true killer?”

  “I had assistance.” That good little man Simon of Naples, the real investigator who had come with her from Salerno for the purpose and had died for it.

  Mansur, unusual for him, struck in, indicating Adelia. “She must not be put in such danger again. The will of Allah and only the will of Allah saved her from the pit last time.”

  Adelia smiled fondly at him. Let him attribute it to Allah if he liked. Actually, she had survived the child killer’s lair only because a dog had led Rowley to it in time. What neither he, nor God, nor Allah had saved her from were memories of a nightmare that still reenacted themselves in her daily life as sharply as if they were happening all over again— often, this time, to young Allie.

  “Of course she won’t be in danger again,” the bishop told Mansur with energy. “This case is completely different. There’s been no murder here, only a clumsy attempt at one. Whoever tried to do it is long gone. But don’t you see?” Another bowl tipped as he thumped the board. “Don’t you see? Everybody will believe Eleanor to be the poisoner; she hates Rosamund and she was possibly in the neighborhood. Wasn’t that Gyltha’s immediate conclusion? Won’t it be the world’s?” He took his eyes away from Mansur and to the woman opposite him. “In the name of God, Adelia, help me.”

  With a jerk of her chin toward the door, Gyltha nudged Mansur, who nodded, rose, and took an unwilling Father Paton by the scruff of his neck.

  The two who remained seated at the table didn’t notice their going. The bishop’s gaze was on Adelia; hers on her clasped hands.

  Stop resenting him, she was thinking. It wasn’t abandon-ment; mine was the refusal to marry, only mine the insistence we shouldn’t meet again. It is illogical to blame him for keeping to the agreement.

  Damn him, though, there should have been something all these months—at least an acknowledgment of the baby.

  “How are you and God getting along?” she asked.

  “I serve Him, I hope.” She heard amusement in his voice.

  “Good works?”

  “When I can.”

  She thought, A
nd we both know, don’t we, that you would sacrifice God and His works, me and your daughter, all of us, if doing so would serve Henry Plantagenet.

  He said quietly, “I apologize for this, Adelia. I would not have broken our agreement not to meet again for anything less.”

  She said, “If Eleanor is proved guilty, I won’t lie. I shall say so.”

  “Ya-hah.” Now that was Rowley, the energy, the shout that shivered the wine in its jug—here, for an instant, was her joyous lover back again.

  “Couldn’t resist, could you? Are you taking the baby with you? Yes, of course, you’ll still be breast-feeding—damned odd to think of you as lactating stock.”

  He was up and had opened the door, calling for Paton. “There’s a basket of mushrooms in my pack. Find it and bring it here.” He turned to Adelia, grinning. “Thought you’d want to see some evidence.”

  “You devil,” she said.

  “Maybe, but this devil will save its king and its country or die trying.”

  “Or kill me in the process.” Stop it, she thought, stop sounding like a wronged woman; it was your decision.

  He shrugged. “You’ll be safe enough, nobody’s out to poison you. You’ll have Gyltha and Mansur— God help anyone who touches you while they’re around—and I’m sending servants along. I presume that canine eyesore goes, too?”

  “Yes,” she said. “His name’s Ward.”

  “One more of the prior’s finds to keep you safe?

  I remember Safeguard.”

  Another creature that had died saving her life. The room was full of memories that hurt—and with the dangerous value of being shared.

  “Paton is my watchdog,” he said conversationally. “He guards my virtue like a bloody chastity belt. Incidentally, wait until you see Fair Rosamund’s labyrinth—biggest in Christendom. Mind you, wait til you see Fair Rosamund herself, she’s not what you’d expect. In fact—”