The Serpent's Tale Page 9

  “I’m not leaving her,” Adelia shouted after him, causing a momentary pause in the recital of souls from beyond the screen. She turned to Gyltha. “How dare he. I won’t.”

  Gyltha pressed on Adelia’s shoulders to force her down onto a hassock, then sat beside her. “He’s right.”

  “He’s not. Suppose we get cut off by snow, by anything? She needs to be fed.”

  “Then I’ll see as she is.” Gyltha took Adelia’s hand and bounced it gently. “It’s time, girl,” she said. “Time she was weaned proper. You’re a’drying up; you know it, the little un knows it.”

  Adelia was hearing the truth; Gyltha never told her anything else. In fact, the weaning process had been going on for some weeks as her breast milk diminished, both women chewing food to a pap and supplementing it with cow’s milk to spoon into Allie’s eager mouth.

  If breast-feeding, which the childless Adelia had considered would be an oozing embarrassment, had proved to be one of life’s natural pleasures, it had also been the excuse to have her child always with her. For motherhood, while another joy, had burdened her with a tearing and unexpected anxiety, as if her senses had been transferred into the body of her daughter, and, by a lesser extension, into that of all children. Adelia, who’d once considered anyone below the age of reason to be alien and had treated them as such, was now open to their grief, their slightest pain, any unhappiness.

  Allie suffered few of these emotions; she was a sturdy baby, and gradually Adelia had become aware that the agony was for herself, for the two-day-old creature that had been abandoned by an unknown parent on a rocky slope in Italy’s Campania nearly thirty years before. During her growing up it had not mattered; an incident, even amusing in that the couple who’d discovered her had commemorated an event all three had considered fortunate by giving her Vesuvia as one of her names. Childless, loving, clever, eccentric, Signor and Signora Aguilar, both doctors trained in the liberal tradition of Salerno’s great School of Medicine, he a Jew, she a Catholic Christian, had found in Adelia not only a beloved daughter but a brain that superseded even their intelligence, and had educated it accordingly. No, abandonment hadn’t mattered. It had, in fact, turned out to be the greatest gift that the real, unknown, desperate, sorrowing, or uncaring mother could have bestowed on her child.

  Until that child had given birth to a baby of her own.

  Then it came. Fear like a typhoon that wouldn’t stop blowing, not just fear that Allie would die but fear that she herself would die and leave the child without the mercy that had been bestowed on her. Better they both die together.

  Oh, God, if the poisoner was not content merely with Rosamund’s death ... or if the killers from the bridge were waiting en route ... or if she should leave her child in a Godstow suddenly overwhelmed by fire ...

  This was obsession, and Adelia had just enough sense to know that, if it persisted, it would damage both herself and Allie.

  “It’s time,” Gyltha said again, and since Gyltha, most reliable of women, said it was, then it was.

  But she resented the ease with which Rowley demanded a separation that would cause her grief and, however unfounded, fear as well. “It’s not up to him to tell me to leave her behind. I hate leaving her, I hate it.”

  Gyltha shrugged. “His child, too.”

  “You wouldn’t think so.”

  The messenger’s voice came from the door. “My apologies, mistress, but his lordship asks that you will interview Bertha.”

  “Bertha?”

  “Lady Rosamund’s servant, mistress. The mushrooming one.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Apart from the unremitting prayers for the dead in the church and the canonical hours, the convent had shut down, leaving it in a total, moonless black. The compass of light from Jacques’s lantern lit only the bottom of walls and a few feet of pathway lined by snow as he led the two women to their quarters. There Adelia kissed her baby good night and left Gyltha to put her to bed.

  She and the messenger went on alone, leaving the outer courtyard for open ground. A faint smell suggested that somewhere nearby were vegetable gardens, rotted now by the frost.

  “Where are you taking me?” Her voice went querulous into the blackness.

  “The cowshed, I’m afraid, mistress.” Jacques was apologetic. “The girl’s hidden herself there. The abbess put her to the kitchens, but the cooks refused to work with her, seeing it was her hand that fed the poison to the lady Rosamund. The nuns have tried talking to her but they say it’s difficult to get sense from the poor soul, and she dreads the arrival of the lady’s housekeeper.”

  The messenger chatted on, eager to prove himself worthy of inclusion into his bishop’s strange, investigative inner circle.

  “About the blazon on the poor young man’s purse, mistress. It might profit you to consult Sister Lancelyne. She keeps the convent’s cartulary and register, and has a record of the device of every family who’s made a gift at some time or another.”

  He’d been making good use of his time. It was a messenger’s attribute to persuade himself into the good books of the servants of households he visited. It got him better food and drink before he had to set off again.

  Walls closed in again. Adelia’s boots splashed through the slush of what, in daytime, must be much-used lanes. Her nose registered that they were passing a bakehouse, now a kitchen, a laundry, all silent and invisible in the darkness.

  More open land. More slush, but here and there footprints in a bank of snow where someone had stepped off the path.

  Menace.

  It came at her, unseen, unaccountable, but so strong that she hunched and stood still under its attack as if she were back in the alleys of Salerno and had seen the shadow of a man with a knife.

  The messenger stopped with her. “What is it, mistress?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing.” There were footprints in the snow, valid, explicable footprints no doubt, but for her, remembering those on the bridge, they pointed to death.

  She forced herself to trudge on.

  The acrid stink of hot iron and a remnant of warmth on the air told her they were passing a smithy, its fire banked down for the night. Now a stable and the smell of horse manure that, as they walked on, became bovine—they had reached the cowshed.

  Jacques heaved open one of the double doors to reveal a wide, bespattered aisle between partitioned stalls, most of which were empty. Few beasts anywhere survived the Michaelmas cull—there was never enough fodder to see herds through the winter—but farther up the aisle, the lantern shone on the crusted backsides and tails of the cows that had been left alive to provide winter milk.

  “Where is she?”

  “They said she was here. Bertha,” Jacques called.

  “Bertha.”

  From somewhere in the dark at the far end of the shed came a squeak and rustle of straw as if an extra-large mouse were making for its hole.

  Jacques lit their way up the aisle and shone the lantern into the last of the stalls before hanging it from the hook of an overhead beam. “She’s there, I think, mistress.” He stood back so Adelia could see inside it.

  There was a big pile of straw against the stall’s back wall. Adelia addressed it. “Bertha? I mean you no harm. Please talk to me.”

  She had to say it several times before there was a heave and a face was framed in the straw. At first, with the lantern sending downward light on it, Adelia thought it was a pig’s, then saw that it belonged to a girl with a nose so retroussé as to present only nostrils, giving it the appearance of a snout. Small, almost lashless eyes fixed on Adelia’s face. The wide mouth moved and produced sound high up the scale. “Non me faux,” it sounded like.

  “Non me faux, non me faux.”

  Adelia turned back to Jacques. “Is she French?” “Not as far as I know, mistress. I think she’s saying it was not her fault.”

  The bleat changed. “Donagemme.”

  “‘Don’t let her get me,’” Jacques translated.
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br />   “Dame Dakers?” Adelia asked.

  Bertha hunched in terror. “Turmeinamouse.”

  “‘She’ll turn me into a mouse,’” Jacques said helpfully.

  The irresistible thought came, shamefully, that in the case of this child, the dame’s powers to turn her into an animal would not be stretched very far.

  “Antrappi.” Bertha was becoming less frightened and more confidential, poking forward now to show a thin upper neck and body under head and hair colored the same as the straw that framed them. Her gaze became fixed on Adelia’s neck.

  “‘And catch I in a trap,’” Jacques said.

  Adelia was getting the hang of Bertha’s speech.

  Also, she had become angry, as she always did at the suggestion of magic, appalled that this girl should be terrorized by black superstition. “Sit up,” she said.

  The porcine little eyes blinked and Bertha sat up instantly, spilling straw. She was used to being bullied.

  “Now,” Adelia said, more quietly, “nobody blames you for what happened, but you must tell me how it came about.”

  Bertha leaned forward and poked at Adelia’s necklet. “What be that purty thing?”

  “It’s a cross. Haven’t you seen one before?”

  “Lady Ros do have similar, purtier nor that. What be for? Magic?” This was awful. Had nobody taught the girl Christianity?

  Adelia said, “As soon as I can, I shall buy you one of your own and explain it to you. Now, though, you must explain things to me. Will you do that?”

  Bertha nodded, her eyes still on the silver cross.

  So it began. It took infinite labor on Adelia’s part and wearisome, evasive repetition on Bertha’s, pursuing the theme that it wasn’t her fault, before any relevant information could be teased from her. The girl was so ignorant, so credulous, that Adelia’s opinion of Rosamund became very low—no servant should be so deprived of education. Fair Rosamund, she thought. Not much fairness in the neglect of this sad little thing.

  It was difficult to estimate her age; Bertha herself didn’t know it. Between sixteen and twenty, Adelia guessed, half-starved and as unaware of how the world wagged as any mole in its run.

  Jacques, unnoticed, had slid a milking stool against her hocks, allowing her to sit so that she and Bertha were on a level. He remained standing directly behind her in shadow, saying not a word.

  Ever since she’d heard of Rosamund’s death, Adelia had believed that what she would eventually uncover was the tale of a sad accident.

  It wasn’t. As Bertha gained confidence and Adelia understanding, the story that emerged showed that Bertha had been the accomplice, albeit unwittingly, to deliberate murder.

  On the fatal day, she said, she’d gone into the forest surrounding Wormhold Tower to gather kindling, not mushrooms, pulling a sledge behind her to pile it with such dead branches as could be reached with a crook.

  Lowest of all Rosamund’s servants, it had already been a bad morning for her. Dame Dakers had walloped her for dropping a pot and told her that Lady Rosamund was sick of her and intended to send her away, which, Bertha being without family to turn to, would have meant having to tramp the countryside begging for food.

  “Her’s a dragon,” Bertha whispered, looking round and up in case Dame Dakers had flown in, flapping her wings, to perch on one of the cowshed’s beams. “Us calls her Dragon Dakers.”

  Miserably, Bertha had gathered so much fuel— afraid of Dragon Dakers’s wrath if she didn’t—that, having tied the bundled wood to the sledge, she found it impossible to pull, at which point she had sat down on the ground and bawled her distress to the trees.

  “And then her come up.”

  “Who came?”

  “Her did. Old woman.”

  “Had you ever seen her before?”

  “’Course not.” Bertha regarded the question as an insult. “Her didn’t come from our parts. Second cook to Queen Eleanor, she was. The queen. Traveled everywhere with un.”

  “That’s what she told you? She worked for Queen Eleanor?”

  “Her did.”

  “What did this old woman look like?”

  “Like a old woman.”

  Adelia took a breath and tried again. “How old?

  Describe her. Well-dressed? In rags? What sort of face? What sort of voice?”

  But Bertha, lacking both observation and vocabulary, was unable to answer these questions. “Her was ugly, but her was kind,” she said. It was the only description she could give, kindness being so rare in Bertha’s life that it was remarkable.

  “In what way was she kind?”

  “Her gave I them mushrooms, didn’t her? Magic, they was. Said they’d make Lady Ros look on I with”—Bertha’s unfortunate nose had wrinkled in an effort to recall the word used—“favor.”

  “She said your mistress would be pleased with you?”

  “Her did.”

  It took time, but eventually something of the conversation that had taken place in the forest between Bertha and the old woman was reconstructed.

  “That’s what I do for my lady, Queen Eleanor,” the old woman had said. “I do give her a feast of these here mushrooms, and her do look on me with favor.”

  Bertha had inquired eagerly whether they also worked on less-exalted mistresses.

  “Oh, yes, even better.”

  “Like, if your mistress were going to send you off, she wouldn’t?”

  “Send you off? Promote you more like.”

  Then the old woman had added, “Tell you what I’ll do, Bertha, my duckling, I like your face, so I’ll let you have my mushrooms to cook for your lady. Fond of mushrooms, is she?”

  “Dotes on ’em.”

  “There you are, then. You cook her these and be rewarded.

  Only you must do it right away now.”

  Amazed, Adelia wondered for a moment if this was a fairy tale that Bertha had concocted in order to conceal her own guilt. Then she abandoned the thought; nobody had ever bothered to tell Bertha fairy tales in which mysterious old women offered girls their heart’s desire—or any fairy tales at all. Bertha was incapable of concoction, anyway.

  So that day in the forest, now eager and full of strength, Bertha had tied the basket of mushrooms to the wood on her sledge and dragged both back to Wormhold Tower.

  Which was almost deserted. That, Adelia thought, was significant. Dame Dakers had left for the day to go to a hiring fair in Oxford in order to find a new cook—cooks, it seemed, never endured her strictures for long and were constantly leaving. The other staff, free of the housekeeper’s eye, had taken themselves off, leaving Fair Rosamund virtually alone.

  So, in an empty kitchen, Bertha had set to work. The amount of fungi had been enough for two meals, and Bertha had divided them, thinking to leave some for tomorrow. She’d put half into a skillet with butter, a pinch of salt, a touch of wild garlic, and a sprinkling of parsley, warmed them over a flame until the juices ran, and then taken the dish up to the solar where Rosamund sat at her table, writing a letter.

  “Her could write, you know,” Bertha said in wonder.

  “And she ate the mushrooms?”

  “Gobbled ’em.” The girl nodded. “Greedy like.”

  The magic had worked. Lady Rosamund, most unusually, had smiled on Bertha, thanked her, said she was a good girl.

  Later, the convulsions had begun ...

  Even now, Adelia discovered, Bertha did not suspect the crone in the forest of treachery. “Accident,” she said. “Weren’t the old un’s fault. A wicked mushroom did get into that basket by mistake.”

  There was no point in arguing, but there had been no mistake. In the selection Bertha had saved and Rowley had shown Adelia, the Death Cap was as numerous as any other species—and carefully mixed in among them.

  Bertha, however, refused to believe ill of someone who’d been nice to her. “Weren’t her fault, weren’t mine. Accident.”

  Adelia sat back on her stool to consider. Such an undoubted murder,
only Bertha could believe it an accident, only Bertha could think that royal servants roamed the forest bestowing gifts of enchanted mushrooms on anyone they met. There had been meticulous planning. The old woman, whoever she was, had spun a web to catch the particular fly that was Bertha on the particular day when Rosamund’s dragon, Dakers, had been absent from her mistress’s side.

  Which argued that the old woman had been privy to the movements of Rosamund’s household, or instructed by someone who was.

  Rowley’s right, Adelia thought, someone wanted Rosamund dead and the queen implicated. If Eleanor had ordered it done, she’d hardly have chosen an old woman who’d mention her name. No, it hadn’t been Eleanor. Whoever had done it had hated the queen even more than Rosamund. Or maybe merely wanted to enrage her husband against her and thereby plunge England into conflict. Which they might.

  The shed had become quiet. Bertha’s mumbles that it wasn’t her fault had faded away, leaving only the sound of cows’ chewing and the slither of hay as they pulled more from their mangers.

  “For God’s sake,” Adelia asked Bertha desperately, “didn’t you notice anything about the old woman?”

  Bertha thought, shaking her head. Then she seemed puzzled. “Smelled purty,” she said.

  “She smelled pretty? In what way pretty?” “Purty.” The girl was crawling forward now, her nose questing like a shrew’s. “Like you.”

  “She smelled like me?”

  Bertha nodded.

  Soap. Good scented soap, Adelia’s one luxury, used only two hours ago in the allover wash to cleanse her from her travels. Bars of it, made with lye, olive oil, and essence of flowers, were sent to her once a year by her foster mother from Rome— Adelia had complained in one of her letters of the soap in England, where the process was based on beef tallow, making its users smell as if they were ready for the oven.

  “Did she smell like flowers?” she asked. “Roses? Lavender? Chamomile?” And she knew it was useless. Even if Bertha was conversant with these plants, she would know them only by local names unfamiliar to Adelia.

  It had been a gain, though. No ordinary old woman gathering mushrooms in a forest would smell of perfumed soap, even supposing she used soap at all.