The Serpent's Tale

by Ariana Franklin

  Cross swore.

  The kitchen was deserted for the night. The nuns prepared its enormous chopping block with the palliasse and clean sheets for the patient to lie on, then bowed and left.

  Young Poyns’s eyes were goggling in his head and his breathing was fast; he was feverish and very frightened. “It don’t hurt. It don’t hurt at all.”

  Adelia smiled at him. “No, it wouldn’t. And it won’t, you’re going to go to sleep.” She got the opium bottle and a clean cloth out of her bag. Mansur was already lowering her net of knives into the bubbling pot of water hanging from a jack over the fire; hot steel cut better than cold.

  The light in the kitchen, however, was insufficient. “You,” she said to Cross. “Two candles. One in each hand. Hold them where I tell you, but don’t let them drip.”

  Cross was watching Mansur raise the knives from the pot and take them out of the net with his bandaged hands. “You sure he knows what he’s doing?”

  “Candles,” Adelia hissed at him. “Help or get out.” He helped; at least, he held the candles, but as she put the opium-soaked cloth over the patient’s face, he tried to intervene. “You’re smotherin’ him, you bitch.” Mansur held him back.

  She had a few seconds; the boy must not breathe the opium too long. “This arm has to come off. You know that really, don’t you? He may die anyway, but he can’t live if I don’t operate right away.”

  “He’s telling you what to do, though?” Cross had begun to be overawed by Mansur, who, with his strength, his robe, and kaffiyeh, was impressive. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he? That’s why he talks funny.”

  “You’ll have to appear to be instructing me,” Adelia said in Arabic.

  Mansur began gabbling in Arabic.

  She had to work fast, thanking God that opium grew plentifully in the Cambridgeshire fens and she had brought a good supply but measuring its benignity against its danger.

  The world shrank to a tabletop.

  Since he had to keep talking, Mansur chose as his theme Kit b’Alf Layla wa-Layla, also known as The Book of a Thousand Nights. So an Oxfordshire convent kitchen rang with the high-pitched voice of a castrato recounting in Arabic the stories that the Persian Scheherazade had concocted for her sultan husband three hundred years earlier in order to delay her execution. He’d told them to Adelia as a child and she had loved them. Now she heard them no more than she heard the pop and crackle of the fire.

  Had Rowley, saved from the cold waters, entered the kitchen, Adelia wouldn’t have looked up, nor recognized him if she had. The mention of her child’s name would have brought the response “Who?” There was only the patient—not even him, really, just his arm. Fold back the flaps of skin.

  “Suturae.”

  Mansur slapped a threaded needle into her outstretched hand and began mopping blood.

  Arteries, veins.

  Saw the bone or cleave it? How the patient might manage his life with only a shoulder stump was not her concern; her thinking could only advance at the speed of the operation.

  A heavy object thumped into the kitchen waste pail.

  More stitches. Ointment, lint, bandage.

  At last she wiped her forearm across her forehead. Slowly, her vision expanded to take in the beams and pots and a roaring fire.

  Somebody was bothering her. “What’s he say? Will he be all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That was wunnerrful, though, weren’t it?”

  Cross was shaking Mansur warmly by the hand. “Tell him he’s a marvel.”

  “You’re a marvel,” Adelia said in Arabic.

  “I know.”

  “How are your hands, my dear?” she asked. “Can you carry him back to the infirmary?”

  “I can.”

  “Then wrap him up warm and be quick before the soporific wears off. Careful of his shoulder. Tell Sister Jennet he’s likely to vomit when he comes round. I’ll be along in a minute.”

  “He’ll live now, won’t he? Going to be all right, the lad, ain’t he?”

  She turned on the botherer. She was always bad-tempered at this point; it had been a race and, like a runner, she needed time to recover and—Cross, was it?—wasn’t giving her any.

  “The doctor doesn’t know,” she said—to hell with the bedside manner; it wasn’t as if this man had been nice to her on the boat. “Your friend has youth on his side, but his injury was poisoned for too long and”—she leaned in to the attack—“should have been treated before this. Now go away and leave me alone.”

  She watched him slouch off after the laden Mansur, then sat herself by the fire, making lists in her head. There was plenty of willow bark, thanks be; the patient would need it for the pain. If he lived.

  The stink of decomposition coming from the kitchen pail was a worry to her; after all, this was the kitchen that served their food. A rat appeared from behind a cupboard, its whiskers twitching in the direction of the pail. Adelia reached for the woodpile and threw a log at it.

  What to do with severed limbs? In Salerno, she’d had other people to dispose of them. She’d always suspected they mixed them with the pigs’ swill; it was one of the reasons she had been wary of eating pork.

  Wrapping herself in her cloak and carrying the bucket, she went out into the alley to find some place of disposal. It was shockingly cold after the kitchen’s heat, and very dark.

  Farther down the alley someone began screaming. Went on screaming.

  “I can’t,” Adelia said out loud. “I just can’t.” But she began blundering toward the sound, hoping somebody else would get there first and deal with whatever it was.

  A lantern came bobbing out of the darkness with the sound of running. “Who’s that?” It was the messenger, Jacques. “Oh, it’s you, mistress.”

  “Yes. What is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They trotted toward it, being joined as they went by other lanterns that gave glimpses of alarmed faces and slippered feet.

  Past the laundry, past the smithy, past the stables—all of it déjà vu, and horrible because Adelia now knew where the screams were coming from.

  The cowshed doors were open, with people clustering around outside them, some trying to comfort a hysterical milkmaid, though most were transfixed and gaping, holding their lanterns high so that light shone on the dangling figure of Bertha.

  A strap round her neck hung her from a hook in a beam. Her bare toes pointed downward toward a milking stool where it lay on its side among the straw.

  The nuns lamented over the dead girl. What, they asked, could have possessed her to commit suicide, that so very grievous sin? Had she not known that God was the owner of her life and, consequently, that she had committed an unlawful act against God’s own dominion, forbidden by Scripture and Church?

  No, Adelia thought angrily, Bertha hadn’t known that; nobody would have taught her.

  Guilt, the sisters said. Hers was the hand that had given poisoned mushrooms to Rosamund; remorse had overcome her.

  But they were good and charitable women, and though Bertha would have to be interred in unconsecrated ground outside their convent walls, they took the body to their own chapel to keep a vigil over it in the meantime. They chanted prayers for the dead as they went. The crowd from the cowshed followed them.

  Bertha had never had so much attention. Death in such a small community, after all, was always an event; felo-de-se was unheard of and worthy of much attention.

  As she followed the procession through the dark alleys, Adelia stayed angry, thinking how wrong it was that a creature who had been denied so much in her short life must now be denied even a Christian burial.

  Jacques, walking beside her, shook his head. “Terrible thing this is, mistress. To hang herself, poor soul. Felt herself responsible for Lady Rosamund’s death, I reckon.”

  “She didn’t, though, Jacques. You were there. ‘Not my fault, not my fault.’ She said it over and over.” It was one thing Bertha had been clear a
bout.

  “Well, then, she was mortal afraid of Dame Dakers. Couldn’t face her, I reckon.”

  Yes, she had been afraid of Dakers. That would be the verdict. Either Bertha had suffered intolerable remorse for the death of her mistress or she had been so terrified of what Dakers would do to her that she had preferred to take her own life.

  “It’s wrong,” Adelia said.

  “A sin,” Jacques agreed. “God have mercy on her soul all the same.”

  But it was wrong, everything was wrong. The scene of Bertha hanging from the hook had been wrong.

  They were approaching the chapel. Such laypeople as had been accompanying the body stopped. This was the nuns’ territory; they must stay outside. Even if she could have gone on, Adelia couldn’t bear it anymore, not Jacques and his gloomy chatter, not the accompanying, expostulating men and women, not the nuns’ chanting. “Where’s the guesthouse from here?”

  Jacques showed her the way back. “A good night’s sleep, mistress. That’s what you need.”

  “Yes.” But it wasn’t fatigue, though she was very tired, it was the wrongness of everything. It hammered at her mind like something wanting to come in.

  The messenger lighted her up the steps and then went off, muttering and shaking his head.

  Gyltha had heard the screaming even from their room and had called out the window to find its cause. “Bad business,” she said. “They’re saying sorrow made her do it, poor mite.”

  “Or perhaps she was frightened that Dame Dakers would turn her into a mouse and give her to the cat, yes, I know.”

  Gyltha looked up from her knitting, alerted. “Oh, ar? What’s this?”

  “It’s wrong.” Adelia fondled Ward’s ears, then pushed the dog away.

  Gyltha’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing more on the subject. “How’s the Fleming?”

  “I don’t think he’ll survive.” Adelia wandered to their communal bed and soothed back her sleeping daughter’s hair.

  “Serve un right.” Gyltha didn’t hold with mercenaries, whose extensive use during the Stephen and Matilda war had made them universally loathed. Whether they came from Flanders or not—and most of them did—the name “Fleming” had become a euphemism for rape, pillage, and cruelty. “One thing about the king,” she said, “he got rid of all they bastards, and now Eleanor’s bringing ’em back.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Gyltha raised her eyebrows. She’d prepared a hot posset—the room smelled deliciously of hot milk and rum. She handed a beaker to Adelia. “You know what time it is?” She pointed to the hour marks on the candle by the bed. “Time you was in bed. Nearly morning. They’ll be singing Matins soon.”

  “It’s all wrong, Gyltha.”

  Gyltha sighed; she knew the signs. “It’ll keep til morning.”

  “No, it won’t.” Adelia roused herself and refastened her cloak. “A measure, I need a measure. Have we any string?”

  There was cord that they used to bind their traveling packs. “And I want that back,” Gyltha said. “Good cord that is. Where you going?”

  “I left the medicine bag in the kitchen. I’d better go and get it.”

  “You stay there,” Gyltha told her sharply. “You ain’t going nowhere without that old Arab goes, too.”

  But Adelia had gone, taking the cord and a lantern with her. Not to the kitchen. She made her way to the nuns’ chapel. It was dawn.

  They had laid Bertha’s body on a catafalque in the little nave. The sheet they’d covered it with dragged all the vague light from the high windows to its own oblong whiteness, condemning the rest of the space to a misty dust.

  Adelia strode up the nave, the shushing of her feet in the rushes disturbing the quiet so that the nun on her knees at the foot of the catafalque turned to see who it was.

  Adelia paid her no attention. She put the lantern on the floor while she turned back the sheet.

  Bertha’s face had a bluish tint; the tip of her tongue was just visible where it stuck out of the side of her mouth. This, with her tiny nose, gave her a look of impudence, like some fairy child.

  The nun—she was one Adelia didn’t know— hissed her concern as Adelia picked up the lantern and, with the other hand, pulled back Bertha’s lids to expose the eyes.

  There were flecks of blood in their whites. Only to be expected.

  Getting onto her knees, Adelia held the lantern as close as she could to the neck. There were lines from the edges of the strap that the girl had hung by, but there were other marks—gouges that traveled down the throat.

  And running horizontally around the skin of the neck beneath the strap bruises was a line of tiny circular indentations.

  The nun was on her feet, trying to flap Adelia away from the body. “What are you doing? You are disturbing the dead.”

  Adelia ignored her, didn’t even hear her. She recovered Bertha’s face with the sheet and turned it back at the other end, lifting the girl’s skirts to expose the lower body.

  The nun ran from the chapel.

  The vagina showed no sign of tearing or, as far as it was possible to see, any trace of semen.

  Adelia replaced the sheet.

  Damn. There was a way of knowing. Her old tutor, Gordinus, had shown her by opening the necks of prisoners who’d been hanged and comparing their hyoid bones with bones of those who’d been garroted—a form of execution peculiar to a district of Pavia, which had inherited it from the Romans. “See, my dear? The bone is rarely broken in garroting, whereas it is, almost invariably, in hanging. Thus, if we are suspicious in a case of strangulation, we may distinguish whether it was selfinflicted or the result of an attack by another. Also, in the case of hanged suicides, there is seldom bleeding into the neck muscles, whereas if we find it in a corpse supposed to have hanged itself, we have cause to be suspicious that we are looking at a case of murder.”

  A dissection ... if she could just do a dissection ... Oh, well, she’d have to rely on measurements ...

  “And what is this?” The deep voice rang through the chapel, dispelling its quiet, seeming to disturb the dust motes and bring in a sharper light.

  The nun was gabbling. “Do you see her, my lord? This woman ...”

  “I see her.” He turned on Adelia, who had run the cord from the top of Bertha’s head to her bare toes. “Are you mad? Why do you dishonor the dead, mistress? Even one such as this?”

  “Hmmm.” Having made a knot in it, Adelia wound the cord around her hand and began vaguely wandering toward the door.

  Splendid in breadth and height and color, the abbot blocked her way. “I asked, mistress, why you interfere with the poor soul lying there?” The West Country accent had gone, replaced by schooled vowels.

  Adelia moved past him. The strap, she thought, perhaps it’s still in the cowshed. And my chain.

  The abbot watched her go and then, with a sweep of his arms, sent the nun back to her vigil.

  Outside, despite a suicide, the presence of a queen, occupation by her mercenaries, and the terrible cold, the wheel of the abbey’s day was being sent spinning. Slipping on dirty, nobbling ice, Godstow’s people hurried past her to reawaken damped-down fires and start their work.

  Jacques caught up with Adelia as she passed the stables. “I waited, mistress. What’s to be done with this?” He was carrying a bucket and swung it in front of her so that she had to stop. It contained an arm; Adelia stared at it for a moment before remembering that, in what seemed like another epoch, she had performed an amputation.

  “I don’t know. Bury it somewhere, I suppose.” She pressed on.

  “Bury it,” Jacques said, looking after her. “And the ground like bloody iron.”

  The cowshed in daylight. Warm, despite the open doors. Sun shining onto its bespattered floor, quiet except for a rhythmic swish from one of the stalls, where a young woman was milking. The stool she sat on was the one that had been kicked over underneath Bertha’s hanging body.

  Her name, she said, was Peg, and it was she
who, entering the shed early to begin the morning’s milking, had discovered Bertha. The sight had sent her into screams, and she’d had to run back home for a drop of her mother’s soothing cordial before she could face returning to the scene and start work.

  “’Tis why I’m so late today. These poor beasts’ve been lowing for me to come and relieve ’em but ’twas the shock, d’ye see. Opened the doors and there she was. Never get over it, I won’t. This old shed, ’twill never be the same again, not to me it won’t.”

  Adelia knew how she felt; the comforting smell of animal flatulence and straw, the innocent homeliness of the place had been invaded. An ancient beam from which a body had hung was now a gibbet. She wouldn’t get over it, either. Bertha had died here, and of all the deaths, Bertha’s cried out the loudest.

  “Can I help ye, mistress?” Peg wanted to know, carrying on milking.

  “I’m looking for a necklet, a cross and chain. I gave it to Bertha. She isn’t wearing it now, and I’d like to put it in her grave with her.”

  Peg’s cap went askew as she shook her head without it losing contact with the cow’s ribs. “Never seen un.”

  In her mind’s eye, Adelia resurrected the scene of an hour or so ago. A man—she thought it was Fitchet the gatekeeper—had run forward, righted the stool that lay below Bertha’s feet, stood on it, and lifted the body so that the strap it hung by came free of the beam’s hook.

  What, then? That’s right, that’s right, other men had helped him lay the body down. Somebody had undone the strap and tossed it away. The people clustering around, hopelessly trying to revive the dead girl, had hindered Adelia from seeing whether her cross and chain was on Bertha’s neck. If it had been, the strap had covered it and pressed it tightly against the girl’s skin as she hanged, forcing its links into her flesh and causing those indentations.

  But if she hadn’t been wearing it ...

  Adelia began looking around.

  In a cobwebby corner, she found the strap. It was a belt, an old one. A worn rivet showed where the owner had been wont to fasten it, but at the far end of the leather, another rivet had been badly contorted where it had been slipped over the hook on the beam and taken the weight of Bertha’s body.