The Serpent's Tale Read online

  Teeth chattering—and not just from the cold— she and the others guided the feet of the dead man as Aelwyn and Walt lowered him.

  Together they laid him down under the birds, positioning him so that if there were drips, they would not fall on his face.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” When the others had climbed out of the hole, she stayed by the dead man for a moment to make him a promise. “Whether we catch your killers or not, I will not leave you here for long.”

  It was almost too long for her; she was so cold she couldn’t manage the ladder and Mansur had to hoist her out.

  The abbess gave up her house to Rowley, saying it was a relief to do so; its steep steps to the front door had become difficult for her. In that he was her superior in God, she could do no less, although it gave him access to the inner courtyard with its cloister, chapel, refectory, and nuns’ dormitory, which were otherwise barred to men overnight. Having taken a look at Father Paton and deciding that he wasn’t a sexual threat, either, she put the secretary in with his master.

  Jacques, Walt, Oswald, and Aelwyn were accommodated in the male servants’ quarters.

  Mansur was given a pleasant room in the men’s guesthouse. Gyltha, Adelia, the baby, and the dog were accommodated just as pleasantly in the females’ wing next to the church. Angled outside steps led up to each guest’s private door, which, since they were on the top floor, gave the two women a view westward over the track to Oxford and the abbey’s fields where they sloped down to the Thames.

  “Duck down,” said Gyltha, examining a large bed. “An’ no fleas.” She investigated further. “And some saint’s put hot bricks to warm it.”

  Adelia wanted nothing so much as to lie down on it and sleep, and, for a while, all three of them did just that.

  They were awakened by bells, one of them tolling as if in their ear and setting the water ewer shivering in its basin on the room’s table.

  Ready to flee, Adelia picked up Allie where she lay between her and Gyltha. “Is it a fire?”

  Gyltha listened. The massive strokes were coming from the church tower nearby, and with them came the chime of other bells, tinnier and much farther away. “It’s Sunday,” she said.

  “Oh, to hell. It’s not, is it?”

  However, courtesy and Adelia’s consciousness of their indebtedness to the abbess demanded that they attend the morning worship to which Godstow was summoning its people.

  And more than just its own people. The church in the outer courtyard was open to everybody, lay and religious—though not, of course, to infidels and the smellier dogs, thus leaving Mansur and Ward still in their beds—and today everybody within walking range was struggling through snow to get to it. The village of Wolvercote came across the bridge en masse, since its own church had been allowed to fall into ruin by the lord of the manor.

  The attraction was the bishop, of course; he was as miraculous as an angel descended. A view of his cope and miter alone was worth the tithes everybody had to pay; he might be able to cure the little un’s cough; for sure he could bless the winter sowing. Several poorly looking milch cows and one limping donkey were already tied up by the water trough outside, awaiting his attention.

  The clergy entered by their own separate doorway to take their seats in the glorious stalls of the choir under the church’s equally glorious fanvaulted roof.

  By virtue of his tonsure, Father Paton sat next to the nuns’ chaplain, a little dormouse of a man, opposite the rows of nuns that included among their black ranks two young women in white veils who had a tendency to giggle; they found Father Paton funny.

  Most bishops used their homilies to wag a finger at sin in general, often in Norman French, their mother tongue, or in Latin on the principle that the less the congregation understood, the more in awe it would be.

  Rowley’s was different, and in an English his flock could understand. “There’s some buggers are saying poor Lady Rosamund has died at the Queen Eleanor’s hand, which it is a wickedness and a lie, and you’ll oblige our Lord by giving it no credit.”

  He left the pulpit to stride up and down the church, lecturing, hectoring. He was here to discover what or who had caused Rosamund’s death, he said, “For I do know she was dearly loved in these parts. Maybe ’twas an accident, maybe ’twasn’t, but if it weren’t, both king and queen’ll see to it the villain be punished according to law. In the meantime, ’tis beholden on us all to keep our counsel and the precious peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Then he kneeled down on the stones and straw to pray, and everyone in church kneeled with him.

  They love him, Adelia thought. As quickly as that, they love him. Is it showmanship? No, it isn’t. He’s beyond that now. Beyond me, too.

  When they rose, however, one man—the miller from across the bridge, judging from the spectral whiteness with which flour had ingrained his skin— raised a question. “Master, they say as how the queen be upsides with the king. Ain’t going to be no trouble twixt ’em, is there?”

  He was backed by a murmur of anxiety. The civil war in which a king had fought a queen was only a generation in the past; nobody here wanted to see another.

  Rowley turned on him. “Which is your missus?”

  “This un.” The man jerked a thumb at the comfortable lady standing beside him.

  “And a good choice you made there, Master Miller, as all can see. But tell me you ain’t been upsides with her along the years some’eres, or her ain’t been upsides with you, but you diddun start a war over it. Reckon as royalty ain’t no different.”

  Amid laughter, he returned to his throne.

  One of the white-veiled girls sang the responsory in honor of the bishop’s presence and sang it so exquisitely that Adelia, usually deaf to music, waited impatiently through the congregation’s answers until she sang again.

  So it was nice to find the same young woman waiting for her in the great courtyard outside after the clergy had filed out. “May I come and see the baby? I love babies.”

  “Of course. I must congratulate you on your voice; it is a joy to hear.”

  “Thank you. I am Emma Bloat.”

  “Adelia Aguilar.”

  They fell into step, or, rather, Adelia stepped and Emma bounced. She was fifteen years old and in a state of exaltation over something. Adelia hoped it was not the bishop. “Are you an oblate?”

  “Oh, no. Little Priscilla is the one taking the veil.

  I am to be married.”

  “Good.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Earthly love ...” Emma twirled in sheer joie de vivre. “God must reckon it as high as heavenly love, mustn’t he, despite what Sister Mold says, or why does He make us feel like this?” She thumped the region of her heart.

  “‘It is better to marry than to burn,’” quoted Adelia.

  “Huh. What I say is, how did Saint Paul know? He didn’t do either.”

  She was a refreshing child and she did love babies, or she certainly loved Allie, with whom she was prepared to play peep-bo longer than Adelia had believed possible without the brain giving way.

  It seemed that the girl must have privilege of some kind, since she was not called back to join the sisters’ afternoon routine. Wealth or rank? Adelia wondered. Or both? She showed no more curiosity about this influx of strangers to the convent than if they had been toys provided for her amusement, though she demanded that they be curious about her. “Ask me about my husband-to-be, ask me, ask me.”

  He was beautiful, apparently, oh so beautiful, gallant, wild with love for her, a writer of romantic poems that rivaled any Paris might have sent to Helen.

  Gyltha raised her eyebrows to Adelia, who raised her own. This was happiness indeed, and unusual to be found in an arranged marriage. For arranged it was; Emma’s father, she told them, was a wine merchant in Oxford and was supplying the convent with the best Rhenish to pay for having her educated as befitted a nobleman’s wife. It was he who had procured the match.

  At this point,
Emma, who was standing by the window, laughed so much that she had to hold on to the mullion.

  “Your intended’s a lord, then?” Gyltha asked, grinning.

  The laughter went, and the girl turned to look out of the window as if its view could tell her something, and Adelia saw that when the exuberance of youth went, beauty would take its place.

  “The lord of my heart,” Emma said.

  It was difficult for the travelers to forgather in order to discuss and plan. Lenient as Godstow was, it could not tolerate the step of a Saracen into its inner courtyard. For the bishop to visit the women’s quarters was equally out of place. There was only the church, and even there a nun was always present at the main altar, interceding with God for the souls of such departed as had paid for the privilege. However, it had a side chapel devoted to Mary, deserted at night yet lit by candles— another gift from the dead that they might be remembered to the Holy Mother—and the abbess had given her permission for its use as a meeting place, as long as they were quiet about it.

  The day’s large congregation had left no warmth behind. Blazing candles on the shrine sent out light and heat only a few feet, leaving the ogival space around them in icy shadow. Entering by a side door, Adelia saw a large figure kneeling before the altar, his cowled head bowed and the fingers of his hands interlaced so tightly that they resembled bare bone.

  Rowley got up as the women entered. He looked tired. “You’re late.”

  “I had to feed the baby,” Adelia told him.

  From the main body of the church came the drone of a nun reading the commemorations from the convent register. She was being literal about it. “Lord, in Thy mercy, bless and recognize the soul of Thomas of Sandford, who did provide an orchard in Saint Giles’s, Oxford, to this convent and departed this life the day after Martinmas in the year of our Lord 1143. Sweet Jesus, in Thy Mercy, look kindly on the soul of Maud Halegod, who did give three silver marks ...”

  “Did Rosamund’s servant tell you anything?” Adelia whispered.

  “Her?” The bishop didn’t bother to lower his voice. “The female’s rattle-headed; I’d have got more out of the bloody donkeys I’ve had to bless all bloody afternoon. She kept bleating, I swear, like a sheep.”

  “You probably frightened her.” In full regalia, he’d have been overwhelming.

  “Of course I didn’t frighten her. I was charming. The woman’s witless, I tell you. You see if you can get some sense out of her.”

  “I shall.”

  Gyltha had found some hassocks piled in a cupboard and was distributing them in a circle, where the candlelight fell on them, each one displaying the blazon of a noble family that didn’t want to dirty its knees when it came to church.

  “Hassocks are sensible,” Adelia said, putting one under the sleeping Allie’s basket in order to keep it off the stones. Ward settled himself on another. “Why don’t the rich endow hassocks for the poor? They’d be remembered longer.”

  “The rich don’t want us comfortable,” Gyltha said. “Ain’t good for us. Give us ideas above our station. Where’s that old Arab?”

  “The messenger’s fetching him.”

  He came, having to stoop through the side door, wrapped in a cloak, Jacques behind him.

  “Good,” Rowley said. “You can go, Jacques.”

  “Ummm.” The young man shifted in complaint. Adelia took pity on him. Messengers had an unenviable and lonely job, spending their time crisscrossing the country with a horse as their only companion. Their masters were hard on them: letters to be delivered quickly, replies brought back even quicker; excuses, such as bad weather, falls, difficult country, or getting lost, discounted in favor of the suspicion that the servant had been wasting his time and his employer’s money in some tavern.

  Rowley, she thought, was being particularly hard on this one; there was no reason why the young man should not be included in their discussions. She suspected that Jacques’s sin lay in the fact that, though he wore the sober Saint Albans livery, he compensated for his lack of height by wearing raised boots and a high plume in his hat, which led to the suspicion that he was following the trend introduced by Queen Eleanor and her court for males as well as women to subscribe to fashion—an idea welcomed by the young generation but condemned as effete by men, like Rowley, like Walt and Oswald, whose choice of clothing material had always been either leather or chain mail.

  Walt had been heard to describe the messenger, not inaccurately, as looking like “a stalk of celery wi’ roots attached,” and Rowley had grumbled to Adelia that he feared his messenger was “greeneryyellery” and “not good, plain old Norman English,” both epithets he reserved for men he regarded as effeminate. “I shall have to send him away. The boy even wears scent. I can’t have my missives delivered by a popinjay.”

  This, thought Adelia, from a man whose ceremonial robes dazzled the eye and took half an hour to put on.

  She decided to intercede. “Are we taking Master Jacques with us to Rosamund’s tower tomorrow?”

  “Of course we are.” Rowley was still irritable. “I may need to send messages.”

  “Then he’ll know as much as we know, my lord. He already does.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  From the altar beyond the screen that separated them, the ceaseless muttering of prayer for the dead went on as, with different nuns taking up the task, it would go on all night.

  “... of your mercy, the soul of Thomas Hookeday, hayward of this parish, for the sixpence he did endow ...”

  Rowley produced the saddle roll that had belonged to the dead man on the bridge. “Hasn’t been time to look through it yet.” He unbuckled the straps and put it on the floor to unroll it. With Jacques standing behind them, the four sat round and considered its contents.

  Which were few. A leather bottle of ale. Half a cheese and a loaf neatly wrapped in cloth. A hunting horn—odd equipment for a man traveling without companions or dogs. A spare cloak with fur trimming, surprisingly small for what had been a tall man—again, carefully folded.

  Wherever the youngster had been heading, he was banking on finding food and lodging there; the bread and cheese wouldn’t have sustained him very far.

  And there was a letter. It appeared to have been pushed just under the flap between the buckles of the leather straps that secured the roll.

  Rowley picked it up and smoothed it out.

  “‘To Talbot of Kidlington,’” he read. “‘That the Lord and His angels bless you on this Day that enters you into Man’s estate and keep you from the Path of Sin and all unrighteousness is the dearest hope of your affct cousin, Wlm Warin, gentleman-at-law, who hereby sends: two silver marks as an earnest of your inheritance, the rest to be Claimed when we do meet. Written this day of Our Lord, the sixteenth before the Kalends of January, at my place of business next Saint Michael at the North Gate of Oxford.’”

  He looked up. “Well, there we are, then. Now we know our body’s name.”

  Adelia nodded slowly. “Hmm.”

  “What’s wrong with that? The boy’s got a name, a twenty-first birthday, and an affectionate cousin with an address. Plenty for you to work on. What he hasn’t got is two silver marks. I imagine the thieves took those.”

  Adelia noted the “you”; this was to be her business, not the bishop’s. “Don’t you think it odd,” she asked, “if the family arms on his purse were not to tell us who he was, here is a letter that does. It gives us almost too much information. What affectionate writer calls his cousin Talbot of Kidlington rather than just Talbot?”

  Rowley shrugged. “A perfectly standard superscription.”

  Adelia took the letter from him. “And it’s on vellum. Expensive for such a brief, personal note. Why didn’t Master Warin use rag paper?”

  “All lawyers use vellum or parchment. They think paper is infra dignitatem.”

  But Adelia mused on. “And it’s crumpled, just shoved between the buckles. Look, it’s torn on one of them. Nobody treats vellum like th
at—it can always be scraped down to use again.”

  “Perhaps the lad was in a rush when he received it, stuffed it away quickly. Or he was angry because he was expecting more than two marks? Or he doesn’t give an owl’s hoot for vellum. Which”—the bishop was losing his patience—“at this moment, I don’t, either. What is your point, mistress?”

  Adelia considered for a moment.

  Whether the body in the icehouse was that of Talbot of Kidlington or not, when alive it had belonged to a neat man; his clothing had told her that. So did the care he’d expended on wrapping the contents of his saddle roll. People with such tidy habits—and Adelia was one of their number—did not carelessly thrust a document on vellum into an aperture with the flat of the hand, as this had been.

  “I don’t think he even saw this letter,” she said. “I think the men who killed him put it there.”

  “For the Lord’s sake,” Rowley hissed at her, “this is overelaboration. Adelia, highway villains do not endow their victim with correspondence. What are you saying? It’s a forgery to put us off the track? Talbot of Kidlington isn’t Talbot of Kidlington? The belt and the purse belong to someone else entirely?”

  “I don’t know.” But something about the letter was wrong.

  Arrangements were made for the next day’s excursion. Adelia would accompany bishop, messenger, groom, and one of the men-at-arms on a ride upriver, using the towpath to Rosamund’s tower while Mansur and the other man-at-arms would travel by water, bringing a barge on which to carry back the corpse.

  While discussion went on, Adelia took the opportunity to examine the blazons on all the hassocks. None of them matched the device on the young man’s purse or belt.

  Rowley was talking to Gyltha. “You must stay here, mistress. We can’t take the baby with us.”

  Adelia looked up. “I’m not leaving her behind.” He said, “You’ll have to, it won’t be a family outing.” He took Mansur by the arm. “Come along, my friend, let’s see what the convent has in the way of boats.” They went out, the messenger with them.