The Serpent's Tale (5 page)

Dangling by the back of his surplice from Mansur’s hand, he had the appearance of a surprised kitten.

He’s very young,
Adelia thought,
although he will look the same at forty. I would be sorry for him if he didn’t frighten me so much; he’d have taken my baby away without a thought.

Gyltha was informing the struggling kitten. “You see, lad,” she said, bending to put her face close, “we come to see Bishop Rowley.”

“No, no, that is impossible. His lordship departs for Normandy tomorrow and has much to do before then.” Somehow, horizontally, the little priest achieved dignity. “I attend to his affairs….”

But the door had opened and a procession was entering in a blaze of candles, bearing at its center a figure from an illuminated manuscript, majestic in purple and gold.

Gyltha’s right,
Adelia thought immediately,
the miter doesn’t suit him.
Then she took in the set of jowls, the dulled eyes, so changed from the man she remembered.

No, we’re wrong: It does.

His lordship assessed the situation. “Put him down, Mansur,” he said in Arabic.

Mansur opened his hand.

Both pages carrying his lordship’s train leaned out sideways to peer at the ragbag of people who had floored Father Paton. A white-haired functionary began hammering on the tiles with his wand of office.

Only the bishop appeared unmoved. “All right, steward,” he said. “Good evening, Mistress Adelia. Good evening, Gyltha, you look well.”

“So do you, bor.”

“How’s Ulf?”

“At school. Prior says as he’s doing grand.”

The steward blinked; this was lèse-majesté. He watched his bishop turn to the Arab. “Dr. Mansur,
as-salaam alaykum.
”

“Wa alaykum as-salaam.”

This was worse. “My lord…”

“Supper will be served up here as quickly as may be, steward, we are short of time.”

We
, thought Adelia. The episcopal “we.”

“Your vestments, my lord…Shall I fetch your dresser?”

“Paton will divest me.” The bishop sniffed, searching for the source of a smell. He found it and added, “Also, bring a bone for the dog.”

“Yes, my lord.” Pitiably, the steward wafted the other servants from the room.

The bishop processed to the bedroom, the secretary following and explaining what he had done, what
they
had done. “I cannot understand the antagonism, my lord, I merely made arrangements based on the information supplied to me from Oxford.”

Bishop Rowley’s voice: “Which seem to have become somewhat garbled on the journey.”

“Yet I obeyed them as best I could, to the letter, my lord…. I cannot understand….” Outpourings of a man misjudged came to them through the open door as, at the same time, Father Paton divested his master of cope, dalmatic, rochet, pallium, gloves, and miter, layer after layer of embroidered trappings that had employed many needlewomen for many years, all lifted off and folded with infinite care. It took time.

“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 Antioch; 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 teeny-weeny 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.

T
he 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,” Gytha 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?