The Serpent's Tale (20 page)

What made her a brilliant anatomist, Dr. Gershom had once told her, was instinct. She’d been offended. “Logic and training, Father.” He’d smiled. “Man provided logic and training, maybe, but the Lord gave you instinct, and you should bless him for it.”

Two crimes.

One, Rosamund had copied inflammatory letters. Two, Rosamund had been murdered.

Discovering whom it was who had urged Rosamund to write her letters was one thing. Discovering her murderer was another. And both solutions were contradictory, as far as Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Bishop of Saint Albans were concerned.

For the queen, the letter writer would be the villain and must be eliminated. Eleanor didn’t give a damn who’d killed Rosamund—would, if she learned who it was, probably reward him.

But for Rowley, the murderer was endangering the peace of the kingdom and must be eliminated. And his claim was the greater, because murder was the more terrible crime.

It would be better, at this stage, to give Rowley open ground for
his
investigation rather than complicating it by allowing the queen to pursue
hers.

Hmm.

Adelia gathered up the documents on her lap, put them back in the footstool box, and replaced its lid. She would do nothing about them until she could consult Rowley.

Eleanor continued to fidget. “Has this benighted tower no place of easement?”

Adelia ushered her toward the garderobe.

“Light.” The queen held out her hand for a candle, and Adelia put one into it—reluctantly. She would see the naughty paintings.

If Adelia could have been any sorrier for the woman, it was then. When you came down to it, Eleanor was consumed by sexual jealousy as raging as that of any fishwife catching her husband in flagrante, and was being stabbed by reminders of it at every turn.

Adelia tensed herself for a storm, but when the queen emerged from under the hanging she looked tired and old, and was silent.

“You should rest, madam,” Adelia said, concerned. “Let us go down…”

There was noise from the stairs, and the two guards in the doorway uncrossed their spears and stood at attention.

A great hill of a man entered, sparkling with energy and frost and dwarfing Schwyz, who followed him in. He was enormous; kneeling to kiss the queen’s hand only put his head on a level with hers.

“If I’d been here, my dear, ’twouldn’t have happened,” he said, still kneeling. He pressed Eleanor’s hand to his neck with both of his, closing his eyes and rocking with the comfort of it.

“I know.” She smiled fondly at him. “My dear, dear abbot. You’d have put your big body in the way of the knife, wouldn’t you?”

“And gone rejoicing to Paradise.” He sighed and stood up, looking down at her. “You going to burn ’em both?”

The queen shook her head. “I have been persuaded that Dampers is mad. We will not execute the insane.”

“Who? Oh, Dakers. She’s mad, sure enough, I told you she was. Let the flame have her, I say. And her bloody mistress with her. Where is the whore?”

He strode across the room to the table and poked the corpse’s shoulder. “Like they said, cold as a witch’s tit. Bit of fire’d warm they both up, get ’em ready for hell.” He turned to wag his finger at Eleanor. “I’m a simple Gloucestershire man, as you know, and, Sweet Mary save me, a sinner, too, but I love my God, and I love my queen with all my soul, and I’m for putting their enemies to the torch.” He spat on Rosamund’s hair. “That’s the Abbot of Eynsham’s opinion of
you
, madam.”

The visitor had caused Montignard to stand up. He was busily and jealously—and uselessly—trying to gain the queen’s attention by urging her to eat. Eynsham, a man built more for tossing bales of hay than for shepherding monastic sheep, dominated the room, taking the breath out of it with the power of his body and voice, filling it with West Country earthiness and accent.

Bucolic he might have been, but everything he wore was of expensive and exquisite clerical taste, though the pectoral cross that had swung from his neck as he bent to the queen was overdone—a chunk of dull gold that could have battered a door in.

He’d taken years off Eleanor; she was loving it. Apart from the egregious Montignard, her courtiers had been too weary from traveling to make much fuss over her escape from death.

Or my part in it
, Adelia thought, suddenly sour. Her hand was hurting.

“Bad news, though, my glory,” the abbot said.

Eleanor’s face changed. “It’s Young Henry. Where is he?”

“Oh, he’s right enough. But the chase was snappin’ at our heels all the way from Chinon, so the Young King, well, he decides to make for Paris ’stead of yere.”

Suddenly blind, the queen fumbled for the arm of her chair and sank into it.

“Now, now, it’s not as bad as that,” the abbot said, his voice deep, “but you know your lad, he never did take to England—said the wine was piss.”

“What are we to do? What are we to do?” Eleanor’s eyes were wide and pleading. “The cause is lost. Almighty God, what are we to do now?”

“There, there.” The abbot knelt beside her, taking her hands in his. “Nothing’s lost. And Schwyz here, we’ve been speaking together, and he reckons it’s all to the good. Don’t ee, Schwyz?”

At his urging, Schwyz nodded.

“See? And Schwyz do know what he’s about. Not much to look at, I grant, but a fine tactician. For here’s the good news.” Eleanor’s hands were lifted and hammered against her knees. “You hear me, my glory? Listen to me. Hear what our commander Jesus have done for us—He’ve brought the King of France onto our side. Joined un to Young Henry, yes he has.”

Eleanor’s head came up. “
He has?
Oh, at last. God be praised.”

“King Louis as ever is. He’ll bring his army into the field to fight alongside the son against the father.”

“God be praised,” Eleanor said again. “
Now
we have an army.”

The abbot nodded his great head as if watching a child open a present. “A saintly king. Weedy husband he was to you, I’ll grant, but we ain’t marrying him, and God’ll look kindly on his valor now.” He hammered Eleanor’s knees again. “D’you see, woman? Young Henry and Louis’ll raise their banner in France, we’ll raise ours here in England, and together we’ll squeeze Old Henry into submission. Light will prevail against Dark. Twixt us, we’ll net the old eagle and bring un down.”

He was forcing life into Eleanor; her color had come back. “Yes,” she said, “yes. A pronged attack. But have we the men? Here in England, I mean? Schwyz has so few with him.”

“Wolvercote, my beauty. Lord Wolvercote’s camped at Oxford awaiting us with a force a thousand strong.”

“Wolvercote,” repeated Eleanor. “Yes, of course.” Despondency began to leave her as she climbed the ladder of hope the abbot held for her.

“Of
course
of course. A thousand men. And with you at their head, another ten thousand to join us. All them as the Plantagenet has trampled and beggered, they’ll come flocking from the Midlands. Then we march, and oh what joy in Heaven.”

“Got to get to fuck Oxford first,” Schwyz said, “and quick, for fuck’s sake. It’s going to snow, and we’ll be stuck in this fuck tower like fuck Aunt Sallies. At Woodstock, I told the stupid bitch it couldn’t be defended. Let’s go straight to Oxford, I said. I can defend you there. But
she
knew better.” His voice rose from basso to falsetto.
“Oh, no, Schwyz, the roads are too bad for pursuit, Henry can’t follow us here.”
The tone reverted. “Henry fuck can, I know the bastard.”

In a way, it was the strangest moment of the night. Eleanor’s expression, something between doubt and exaltation, didn’t change. Still kneeling by her side, the abbot did not turn round.

Didn’t they hear him?

Did I?

For Adelia had been taken back to the lower Alps of the Graubünden, to which, every year, she and her foster parents had made the long but beautiful journey in order to avoid the heat of a Salerno summer. There, in a villa lent to them by the Bishop of Chur, a grateful patient of Dr. Gershom’s, little Adelia had gone picking herbs and wildflowers with the goatherd’s flaxen-haired children, listening to their chat and that of the adults—all of them unaware that little Adelia could absorb languages like blotting paper.

A strange language it had been, a guttural mixture of Latin and the dialect of the Germanic tribes from which those alpine people were descended.

She’d just heard it again.

Schwyz had spoken in Romansh.

Without looking round, the abbot was giving the queen a loose translation. “Schwyz is saying as how, with your favor on our sleeve, this is a war we’ll win. When he do speak from his heart, he reverts to his own patter, but old Schwyz is your man to his soul.”

“I know he is.” Eleanor smiled at Schwyz. Schwyz nodded back.

“Only he can smell snow, he says, and wants to be at Oxford. An’ I’ll be happier in my bowels to have Wolvercote’s men around us. Can ee manage the journey, sweeting? Not too tired? Then let you go down to the kitchens with Monty and get some hot grub inside ee. It’ll be a cold going.”

“My dear, dear abbot,” Eleanor said fondly, rising, “how we needed your presence. You help us to remember God’s plain goodness; you bring with you the scent of fields and all natural things. You bring us courage.”

“I hope I do, my dear. I hope I do.” As the queen and Montignard disappeared down the stairs, he turned and looked at Adelia, who knew, without knowing how she knew, that he had been aware of her all along. “Who’s this, then?”

Schwyz said, “Some drab of Saint Albans’s. He brought her with him. She was in the room when the madwoman attacked Nelly and managed to trip her up. Nelly thinks she saved her life.” He shrugged. “Maybe she did.”

“Did she now?” Two strides brought the abbot close to Adelia. A surprisingly well-manicured hand went under her chin to tip her head back. “A queen owes you her life, does she, girl?”

Adelia kept her face blank, as blank as the abbot’s, staring into it.

“Lucky, then, aren’t you?” he said.

He took his hand away and turned to leave. “Come on, my lad, let us get this
festa stultorum
on its way.”

“What about her?” Schywz jerked a thumb toward the writing table.

“Leave her to burn.”

“And
her
?” The thumb indicated Adelia.

The abbot’s shrug suggested that Adelia could leave or burn as she pleased.

She was left alone in the room. Ward, seeing his chance, came back in and directed his nose at the tray with its unfinished veal pie.

Adelia was listening to Rowley’s voice in her mind.
“Civil war…Stephen and Matilda will be nothing to it…the Horsemen of the Apocalypse…I can hear the sound of their hooves.”

They’ve come, Rowley. They’re here. I’ve just seen three of them.

From the writing table came a soft sound as Rosamund’s melting body slithered forward onto it.

B
y going against the advice of its commander and dragging her small force with her to Wormhold Tower, Eleanor had delayed its objective—which was to join up with the greater rebel army awaiting her at Oxford.

Now, with the weather worsening, Schwyz was frantic to get the queen to the meeting place—armies tended to disperse when kept idle too long, especially in the cold—and there was only one sure route that would take her there quickly: the river. The Thames ran more or less directly north to south through the seven or so miles of countryside that lay between Wormhold and Oxford.

Since the queen and her servants had ridden from their last encampment, accompanied by Schwyz and his men on foot, boats must be found. And had been. A few. Of a sort. Enough to transport the most important members of the royal party and a contingent of Schwyz’s men but not all of either. The lesser servants and most of the soldiers were going to have to journey to Oxford via the towpath—a considerably slower and more difficult journey than by boat. Also, to do so, they were going to have to use the horses and mules that the royal party had brought with them.

All this Adelia gathered as she emerged into the tower’s bottom room, where shouted commands and explanations were compounding chaos.

A soldier was pouring oil onto a great pile of broken furniture while servants, rushing around, screamed at him to wait before applying the flame as they removed chests, packing cases, and boxes that had been carried into the guardroom only hours before. Eleanor traveled heavy.

Schwyz was yelling at them to leave everything; neither those who were to be accommodated in the few boats nor those who would make the trek overland to Oxford could be allowed to carry baggage with them.

Either they didn’t hear him or he was ignored. He was being maddened further by Eleanor’s insistence that she could not proceed without this servant or that and, even when agreement was reached, by the favored ones’ refusal to stand still and be counted. Part of the trouble seemed to be that the Aquitanians doubted the honesty of their military allies; Eleanor’s personal maid shrieked that the royal wardrobe could not be entrusted to “sales mercenaries,” and a man declaring himself to be the sergeant cook was refusing to leave a single pan behind for the soldiers to steal. So outside the tower, soldiers struggled with frozen harnesses to ready the horses and mules, and the queen’s Aquitanians argued and ran back and forth to fetch more baggage, none of which could be accommodated.

There and then Adelia decided that whatever else happened, she herself would make for the towpath if she could—and quickly. Among this amount of disorganization, nobody would see her go and, with luck and the Lord’s good grace, she could walk to the nunnery.

First, though, she had to find Rowley, Jacques, and Walt.

She stood on the stairs looking for them in the confusion before her; they weren’t there, they must have been taken outside. What she did see, though, was a black shape that kept to the shadow of the walls as it made its way toward the stairs, jumping awkwardly like a frog because its feet were hobbled. The rope that had been put round its neck flapped as it came.

Adelia drew back into the dark of the staircase, and as the creature hopped up the first rise, caught it by its arm. “No,” she said.

The housekeeper’s hands and feet had been tied tightly enough to restrain a normal woman, but whoever had done it hadn’t reckoned with the abnormal: Dakers had hopped from wherever her guards had left her in order to try and join her mistress at the top of the tower.

And still would if she could. As Adelia grabbed her, Dakers threw her thin body to shake her off. Unseen by anyone else, the two women struggled.

“You’ll
burn
,” hissed Adelia. “For God’s sake, do you want to burn with her?”

“Yes-s-s.”

“I won’t let you.”

The housekeeper was the weaker of the two. Giving up, she turned to face Adelia. She had been roughly treated; her nose was bleeding, and one of her eyes was closed and puffy. “Let me go, let me go. I’ll be with her. I
got
to be with her.”

How insane. How sad.
A soldier was readying the tower’s destruction; servants were oblivious to all but their own concerns. Nobody cared if the queen’s would-be assassin died in the flames, might even prefer it if she did.

They can’t do that. She’s mad.
One of the reasons Adelia loved England was that if Dakers were brought to trial for her attempt on the queen’s life, no court in the country, seeing what she was, would sentence her to death. Eleanor herself had held to it. Restrain the woman with imprisonment, yes, but the reasonable, ancient dictum of
“furiosus furore solum punitur”
(the madness of the insane is punishment enough) meant that anyone who’d once possessed reason but by disease, grief, or other accident had lost the use of his or her understanding must be excused the guilt of his or her crime.

It was a ruling that agreed with everything Adelia believed in, and she wasn’t going to see it bypassed, even if Dakers herself was a willing accessory and preferred to die, burning, alongside Rosamund’s body. Life was sacred; nobody knew that better than a doctor who dealt with its absence.

The woman was pulling away from her again. Adelia tightened her grip, feeling a physical revulsion; she, who was never nauseated by corpses, was repelled by this living body she had to clutch so closely to her, by its thinness—it was like hugging a bundle of sticks—by its passion for death.

“Don’t you want to avenge her?” She said it because it was all she could think of to keep the woman still, but, after a minute, a measure of sanity came into the eyes glaring into hers.

The mouth stopped hissing. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t the queen.”

Another hiss. Dakers didn’t believe her. “She paid so’s it could be done.”

“No.” Adelia added, “It wasn’t Bertha, either.”

“I know that.” Contemptuously.

There was a sudden, curious intimacy. Adelia felt herself sucked into whatever understanding the woman possessed, saw her own worth as an ally calculated, dismissed—and then retrieved. She was, after all, the
only
ally.

“I find things out. It’s what I do,” Adelia said, slackening her grip a little. Suppressing distaste, she added, “Come along with me and we’ll find things out together.”

Once more she was weighed, found wanting, weighed again, and adjudged as possibly useful.

Dakers nodded.

Adelia fumbled in her pocket for her knife and cut the rope round the housekeeper’s ankles and took the noose from round the neck over her head. She paused, unsure whether to free her hands as well. “You promise?”

The only good eye squinted at her. “You’ll find out?”

“I’ll try. It’s why the Bishop of Saint Albans brought me here.” Not very reassuring, she thought, considering that the Bishop of Saint Albans was leaving the place as a prisoner and Armageddon was about to break out.

Dakers held out her skinny wrists.

Schwyz had left the guardroom in order to gain control of the situation in the bailey outside. Some of the servants had gone with him; the few that remained were still gathering their goods and didn’t notice the two women sidling out.

There was equal confusion in the bailey. Adelia covered Dakers’s head with the hood of her cloak and then put up her own so that they would be just two more anonymous figures in the scurry.

A rising wind added to the noise as it whirled little showers of snowflakes that were slow to melt. Moonlight came and went like a guttering candle.

Disregarded, still clutching Dakers, Adelia moved through the chaos with Ward at her heels, looking for Rowley. She glimpsed him on the far side of the bailey, and it was a relief to see that Jacques and Walt were with him, all three roped together. Nearby, the Abbot of Eynsham was arguing over them with Schwyz, his voice dominating the noise made by the wind and bustle. “…I don’t care, you tyrant, I need to know what they know. They come with us.” Schwyz’s retort was whirled away, but Eynsham had won. The three prisoners were prodded toward the crowd at the gateway, where Eleanor was getting up on a horse.

Damn,
damn
it.
She
must
talk to Rowley before they were separated. Whether she could do it unnoticed…and with a failed assassin in tow…yet she dared not let go of Dakers’s hand.

And Dakers was laughing, or, at least, a low cackle was emerging from the hood round her face. “What is it?” Adelia asked, and found that in taking her eyes off Rowley and the others she had lost sight of them. “Oh, be
quiet.
”

Agonized with indecision, she towed the woman toward the archway that led to the outer bailey and the entrance to the maze. The wind blew the servants’ cloaks open and closed as they milled about so that the golden lion of Aquitaine on their tabards flickered in the light of the torches. Soldiers, tidy in their padded jackets, tried to impose order, snatching unnecessary and weighty items away from clutching arms and restraining their owners from snatching them back. Only Eleanor was calm, controlling her horse with one hand and shielding her eyes with the other in order to watch what was being done, looking for something.

She saw Ward, like a small, black sheep against the snow, and pointed the animal out to Schwyz with a gloved finger as she gave an order. Schwyz looked round and pointed in his turn. “That one, Cross,” he shouted at one of his men. “Bring her. That one with the dog.”

Adelia found herself seized and hoisted onto a mule. She struggled, refusing to let go of Dakers’s hand.

The man called Cross took the line of least resistance; he lifted Dakers as well so that she clung on to Adelia’s back. “And bloody stay there,” he yelled at them. With one hand on the mule’s bridle and his body pinning Adelia’s leg, he took his charges through the archway and into the outer bailey, holding back until the rest of the cavalcade joined them.

Eleanor rode to the front, Eynsham just behind her. The open gates of the maze yawned like a black hole before them.

“Go straight through, Queen of my heart,” the abbot called to her joyfully. “Straight as my old daddy’s plow.”

“Straight?” The queen shouted back.

He spread his arms. “Didn’t you order I to learn the whore’s mysteries? Diddun I do it for ee?”

“There’s a direct way through?” Eleanor was laughing. “Abbot, my abbot. ‘
And the crooked shall be made straight….
’”

“‘…
and the rough places plain
,’” he finished for her. “That old Isaiah, he knew a thing or two. I am but his servant, and yours. Go, my queen, and the Lord’s path shall lead you through the whore’s thicket.”

Preceded by some of her men, one holding a lantern, Eleanor entered the maze, still laughing. The cavalcade followed her.

Behind them, Schwyz gave another order and a lit torch arched through the air onto the piled tinder in the guardroom….

The abbot was right; the way through the maze had been made straight. Alleys were direct passageways into the next. Blocking hedges revealed themselves as disguised, now open, doors.

Mystery had gone. The wind took away the maze’s silence; the hedges around them bent and shivered like ordinary storm-tossed avenues. Some insidious essence had been withdrawn; Adelia couldn’t be sorry. What she found extraordinary was that if the strange abbot who declared himself a devotee of the queen could be believed, Rosamund herself had shown him the secret of the way through.

“You know that man?” she asked over her shoulder. Flinching, she felt Dakers’s thin chest heave up and down against her back as the housekeeper began cackling again.

“Ain’t he the clever one.” It wasn’t so much a reply as Dakers’s commentary to herself. “Thinks he’s bested our wyrm, so he do, but that’s still got its fangs.” Perhaps it was part of her madness, Adelia thought, that there was no animosity in her voice toward a man who, self-confessed, had visited Rosamund in her tower in order to betray her to the queen.

They were through the maze within minutes. Swearing horribly at the mule, Cross urged it into a trot so that Adelia and Dakers were cruelly bumped up and down on its saddleless spine as it charged the hill.

The wind strengthened and drove snow before it in sporadic horizontal bursts that shut out the moon before letting it ride the sky again. As they crested the hill it slammed, shrieking, into their faces.

Adelia looked back and saw Rowley, Jacques, and Walt being prodded out of the maze by the spears of the men behind them.

There was a howl of triumph from Dakers; her head was turned to the tower—a black, erect, and unperturbed outline against the moon.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Dakers screamed, “our lord Satan did hear me, my darling. I’ll be back for ee, my dear. Wait for me.”

The tower wasn’t burning. It should have been a furnace by now, but despite broken furniture, oil, a draft, and a torch, the bonfire hadn’t caught. Something, some
thing
, had put out the fire.