The Serpent's Tale Page 5

  She interrupted. “Is it at risk?”

  “The labyrinth?”

  “Your virtue.”

  All at once, he was being kind. “Oddly enough, it isn’t. I thought when you turned me down ... but God was kind and tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.”

  “And when Henry needed a compliant bishop.” Stop it, stop it.

  “And the world needed a doctor, not another wife,” he said, still kind. “I see that now; I have prayed to see it; marriage would have wasted you.”

  Yes, yes. If she had agreed to marriage, he’d have refused the bishopric the king had urged on him for political expediency, but for her, there had been the higher priority of her calling. She’d have had to abandon it—he’d demanded a wife, not a doctor, especially not a doctor to the dead.

  In the end, she thought, neither of us would bestow the ultimate, sacrificial gift on the other.

  He got up and went to the baby, making the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. “Bless you, my daughter.” He turned back. “Bless you, too, mistress,” he said. “God keep you both safe, and may the peace of Jesus Christ prevail over the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” He sighed. “For I can hear the sound of their hooves.” Father Paton came in carrying a basket and gave it to his lordship, who then gestured for him to leave.

  Adelia was still staring at Rowley. Among all this room’s superfluity of wealth, the turmoil she’d experienced in it as shades of the past came and went, one thing that should belong to it—its very purpose—had been missing; she had just caught its scent, clear and cold: sanctity, the last attribute she’d expected to find in him. Her lover had become a man of God.

  He took the chair beside her to give her details of the attempt on Rosamund’s life, putting the basket in front of her so that she could examine its contents. In the old days, he couldn’t have sat beside her without touching her; now it was like sitting next to a hermit.

  Rosamund loved stewed mushrooms, he told her; it was well known. A lazy servant, out gathering them for her mistress, had been handed some by an old, unidentified woman, a crone, and had taken them back without bothering to pick more.

  “Rosamund didn’t eat them all, some had been kept for later, and while I was with her I took the remainder to bring with me. I thought you might be able to identify the area they came from or something—you know about mushrooms, don’t you?”

  Yes, she knew about mushrooms. Obediently, Adelia began turning them over with her knife while he talked.

  It was a fine collection, though withering now: boletes that the English called Slippery Jack, winter oysters, cauliflower, blewits, hedgehogs. All very tasty but extraordinarily, most extraordinarily, varied; some of these species grew exclusively on chalk, some under pine trees, others in fields, others in broadleaf woodland.

  Deliberately or not, whoever gathered these had spread the net wide and avoided picking a basketful that could be said to come from a specific location.

  “As I say, it was quite deliberate,” the bishop was saying. “The crone, whoever she was, made a point of it—they were for the Lady Rosamund, nobody else. Whoever that crone was, she hasn’t been seen since. Disappeared. Slipped in a couple of malignant ones, do you see, hoping they’d poison the poor woman, and it’s only through the mercy of God ...”

  “She’s dead, Rowley,” Adelia said.

  “What?”

  “If these fungi duplicate what Rosamund ate, she’s dead.”

  “No, I told you, she recovered. Much better when I left her.”

  “I know.” Adelia was suddenly so sorry for him; if she could have changed what she was going to say, she would have. “But it’s what happens, I’m afraid.” She speared the killer with her knife and lifted it. “It’s a feature of this one that those who eat it apparently get better for a while.”

  Innocuous-looking, white-gilled, its cap now aged into an ordinary brown but still retaining a not unpleasant smell. “It’s called the Death Cap. It grows everywhere; I’ve seen it in Italy, Sicily, France, here in England; I’ve seen its effect, I’ve worked on the corpses who ate it—too many of them. It is always, always fatal.”

  “No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but if she ate one of these, even a tiny bite ...” He had to know. “Sickness and diarrhea at first, abdominal pain, and then a day or two when she’d seem to be recovering. But all the while the poison was attacking her liver and kidneys. There’s absolutely no cure. Rowley, I’m afraid she’s gone.”

  THREE

  N o question now of the bishop crossing from England to Normandy in order to calm a turbulent king. The king’s beloved was dead, and the king would be coming to England himself, riding the air like a demon to ravage and burn—maybe, in his rage, to kill his own wife if he could find her.

  So, at dawn, the bishop rode, too, another demon loose on the world, to be ahead of the king, to find the queen and get her away, to be on the spot, to locate the real culprit, to be able to say: “My lord, hold your hand; this is Rosamund’s killer.”

  To avoid Armageddon.

  With the bishop went those for his purpose, a pitiful few compared to his lordship’s usual train: two men-at-arms, a groom, a secretary, a messenger, a carriage, horses, and remounts. Also an Arab doctor, a dog, two women, and a baby— and to hell if they couldn’t keep up.

  They kept up. Just. Their carriage, Father Paton’s “conveyance,” was splendidly carved, enclosed against the weather by purple waxed cloth with matching cushions among the straw inside, but it was not intended for speed. After three hours of it, Gyltha said that if she stayed in the bugger much longer she’d lose her teeth from rattling, and the poor baby its brains.

  So they transferred to horses, young Allie being placed and padded into a pannier like a grub in a cocoon; Ward, the dog, was stuffed less gently into the other. The change was made quickly to stay up with the bishop, who wouldn’t wait for them.

  Jacques the messenger was sent ahead to prepare the bishop’s palace at Saint Albans for their brief stay overnight and, then, next day, to the Barleycorn at Aylesbury for another.

  It was cold, becoming colder the farther west they went, as if Henry Plantagenet’s icy breath were on their neck and getting closer.

  They didn’t reach the Barleycorn, because that was the day it began to snow, and they left the roads for the Icknield Way escarpment, where avenues of trees and the chalk under their horses’ hooves made the going easier and therefore faster.

  There were no inns on these high tracks, and the bishop refused to waste time by descending to find one. “We’ll make camp,” he said.

  When, eventually, he allowed them to dismount, Adelia’s muscles protested as she struggled to get off her horse. She looked with anxiety toward Gyltha, who was struggling off hers. “Are you surviving?” Tough as leather the fenwoman might be, but she was still a grandmother and entitled to better treatment than this.

  “I got sores where I wou’n’t like to say.”

  “So have I.” And stinging as if from acid.

  The only one looking worse than they did was Father Paton, whose large breakfast at Saint Albans had been jolting out of him, amidst groans, for most of the way. “Shouldn’t have gobbled it,” Gyltha told him.

  Baby Allie, on the other hand, had taken no harm from the journey; indeed, snuggled in her pannier, she appeared to have enjoyed it, despite her hurried feeds when Bishop Rowley had permitted a stop to change horses.

  Carrying her with them, the two women retired to the cart and ministered to their wounds with salves from Adelia’s medicine chest. “The which I ain’t letting Father Fustilugs have any,” Gyltha said vengefully of Father Paton. She’d taken against him.

  “What about Mansur? He’s not used to this, either.”

  “Great lummox ...” Gyltha liked to hide her delight in and love for the Arab. “He’d not say a word if his arse was on fire.”

  Which was true; Mansur cultivated s
toicism to the point of impassivity. His sale as a little boy to Byzantine monks who’d preserved the beauty of his treble singing voice by castration had taught him the futility of complaining. In all the years since he’d found sanctuary with Adelia’s foster parents and become her bodyguard and friend, she’d never heard him utter a querulous sentence. Not that he uttered many words in strange company anyway; the English found him and his Arab dress outlandish enough without the addition of a child’s squeaky speaking voice issuing from a man six feet tall with the face of an eagle.

  Oswald and Aelwyn, the men-at-arms, and Walt, the groom, were uneasy in their dealings with him, apparently crediting him with occult powers. It was Adelia they treated like dirt—though never if Rowley was looking. At first she’d put their discourtesies down to the rigors of the journey, but gradually they became too marked to be disregarded. Unless the bishop or Mansur was nearby, she was never assisted onto a horse nor down, and the occasions when she went off into the trees to answer a call of nature were accompanied by low, offensive whistles. Once or twice she heard Ward yelp as if he’d been kicked.

  Nor had she and Gyltha been provided with sidesaddles. Rowley had ordered them, but somehow, in the haste, they’d been forgotten, leaving the women perforce to ride astride, an unseemly posture for a lady though, actually, one that Adelia preferred because she considered sidesaddles injurious to the spine.

  Nevertheless, the omission had been uncivil and, she thought, intended.

  To church servants like these, she was a harlot, of course; either the bishop’s trull or the Saracen’s, perhaps both. For them it was bad enough to be chasing across country in bad weather to attend the funeral of a king’s mistress without dragging another whore along with them.

  “What’s she with us for?”

  “God knows. Clever with her brains, so they say.”

  “Clever with her quim more like. Is that his lordship’s bastard?”

  “Could be anybody’s.”

  The exchange had been made where she could overhear it.

  Damn it, this would harm him. Rowley had been appointed by Henry II against the wishes of the Church, which had wanted its own man to fill the post of Saint Albans and still hoped for a reason to dismiss the king’s candidate. Knowledge that he’d fathered an illegitimate child would give his enemies their chance.

  Damn the Church, Adelia thought. Our affair was over before he became a bishop. Damn it for imposing impossible celibacy on its people. Damn it for hypocrisy—Christendom was littered with priests wallowing in varieties of sin. How many of them were condemned?

  And damn it for its hatred of women—an abuse of half the world’s inhabitants, so that those who refused to be penned into its sheepfold were condemned as harlots and heretics and witches.

  Damn you, she thought of the bishop’s men, are you so innocent? Are all your children born in wedlock? Which of you jumped over the broomstick with a woman rather than legally marry her?

  And damn you, Bishop Rowley, for placing me in this situation.

  Then, because she was feeding Allie, she damned them all again for making her angry enough to damn them.

  Father Paton escaped her curses; unlovable as he was, he at least treated her like he treated everybody else—as a sexless and unfortunate expense.

  The messenger, Jacques, a gauche, large-eared, somewhat overeager young man, seemed more kindly inclined to her than the others, but the bishop kept him on the gallop with taking messages and preparing the way ahead, so she saw little of him.

  With imperceptible difference, the Icknield Way became the Ridgeway. The cold was gaining an intensity that leeched strength out of humans and horses, but they were at least approaching the Thames and the Abbey of Godstow, which stood on one of its islands.

  Jacques rejoined the company, appearing from the trees ahead like a mounted white bear. He shook himself free of snow as he bowed to Rowley. “Abbess Mother Edyve sends greetings to your lordship and her joy to accommodate you and your party whenever you will. Also, I was to say that she expects the body of the Lady Rosamund to be brought to the convent by river today.”

  Rowley said heavily, “So she is dead.”

  “I trust so, my lord, for the nuns intend to bury her.”

  His bishop glared at him. “Go back there. Tell them we should arrive tonight and that I am bringing a Saracen doctor to examine Lady Rosamund’s corpse and determine how she died.” He turned to Adelia and said in Latin, “You’ll want to see the body, won’t you?”

  “I suppose so.” Though what it could tell her, she wasn’t sure.

  The messenger stopped long enough to stuff bread, cheese, and a flask of ale into his saddlebag before remounting.

  “Shouldn’t you rest first?” Adelia asked him.

  “Don’t mind for me, mistress. I sleep in the saddle.”

  She wished she could. To stay in it at all took strength. Father Paton’s provision of cloaks had been of the cheapest wool and, wearing them, she, Gyltha, and Mansur would have frozen to death on horseback if it hadn’t been for the rough mantles of beaver fur they had brought with them. The fenland was full of beaver, and these were gifts from a grateful trapper Adelia had nursed through pneumonia.

  That afternoon the travelers descended from the hills to the village of Thame and the road leading to Oxford. It was getting dark, still snowing, but the bishop said, “Not far now. We’ll press on with lanterns.”

  It was terrible going; the horses had to be rugged even though they were kept moving. Soon they had to be fitted with headbands that fringed their eyes, usually a device to keep off flies, so they would not be blinded by the thick flakes that swirled and stuck to the lashes.

  It was impossible to see beyond a yard. If the road hadn’t run between hedges, they would have lost their way, lanterns or no lanterns, and ended in a field or river. When the hedges disappeared at a crossroads, Rowley had to call a halt until they found the right track again, which meant the men had to search for it, all the time calling to each other in case any one of them blundered away—an error that, in this cold, would cost him his life.

  For the baby’s sake as well as their own, the women were forced to reenter the carriage and stay there. Father Paton had already done so, complaining that if he stayed in the cold he would lose the use of his secretarial writing hand.

  They hooked one of the lanterns to the arch over their heads and began heaping straw to make a bed, tucking Allie between them to benefit from the heat of their bodies. The cold lanced in like needles through the eyelets where the canopy was tied to its struts, so icy that it nullified the smell of the straw and even of the dog at their feet.

  They were going at walking pace—Mansur was leading the horses—but deep pits in the track concealed by snow caused the carriage to fall and tip with bone-jarring suddenness so that rest was impossible. In any case, anxiety for what the others were suffering outside precluded sleep.

  Gyltha said admiringly of Rowley, “He ain’t a’going to stop, is he?”

  “No.” This was a man who’d pursued a murderer across the deserts of Outremer. An English blizzard wasn’t going to defeat him. Adelia said, “Have no concern for him: He’s showing none for ...” There was a lurch of the carriage, and she grabbed at a strut with her right hand and her baby with her left to stop them being thrown from one side to the other. The lantern swung through an arc of one hundred eighty degrees, and Gyltha lunged upward to snuff out its candle in case it set fire to the canopy.

  “... us,” Adelia finished.

  In the darkness and at an angle, they could hear Father Paton praying for deliverance while, outside, screeching Arabic curses rained on horses that refused to pull. One or another was effective; after another grinding jerk, the carriage went on.

  “You see,” came Gyltha’s voice, as if resuming a conversation, “Rowley, he remembers the war betwixt Matilda and Stephen. He’s a youngster compared to me, but he was born into it, and his parents, they’d have lived thr
ough it, like I did. King Stephen, he died natural in his bed. And Queen Matilda, she’s still going strong. But the war betwixt them ... weren’t so for us commoners. We died over and over. It was like ... like we was all tossed in the air and stayed there with nothing to hold to. The law went, ever’thing went. My pa, he was dragged off his fields one day to build a castle for Hugh Bigod. Never came back. Took three years a’fore we heard he was crushed flat when a stone fell. We near starved without un.”

  Adelia heard the deep intake of breath, heavier than a sigh. Simple sentences, she thought, but what weight they carried.

  Gyltha said, “We lost our Em an’ all. Older than me she was, about eleven. Some mercenaries came through and Ma ran with my brothers and me to hide in the fen, but they caught Em. She was screaming when they galloped off with her, I can hear her now. Never did find out what happened, but she was another as didn’t come back.”

  It was a lecture. Adelia had heard Gyltha talk about the thirteen-year war before, but only in general terms, never like this; as witness to its chaos, the old woman was calling up specters that still gave her pain. Feudalism might be harsh for those at its bottom end, but it was at least a protection. Adelia, who had been brought up both protected and privileged, was being told what happened when order crumbled and civilization went with it.

  “Nor it weren’t no good praying to God. He weren’t listening.”

  Men gave way to basest instincts, Gyltha said. Village lads, decent enough if controlled, saw those controls disappear and themselves became thieves and rapists. “Henry Plantagenet, now, he may be all sorts, but with him a’coming king it stopped, d’you see. It stopped; the ground was put back under us. The crops grew like they had, the sun come up of a morning and set of nights, like it should.”

  “I see,” Adelia said.

  “But you can’t know, not really,” Gyltha told her.

  “Rowley do. His ma and pa, they was commoners, and they lived through it like I did. He’ll move mountains so’s it don’t happen again. He’s seeing to it so’s my Ulf, bless him, can go to school with a full belly as nobody’ll slit open. Bit of traveling? Few snowflakes? What’s that?”