The Serpent's Tale

by Ariana Franklin

  A heavily veined little hand flapped her away; Mother Edyve had become impatient to go. “You are a busy soul, child, and I am grateful for it, but you may leave Dakers’s safety to me.”

  As she hobbled out, she said something else, but the words were indistinct, something like, “After all, I have the keys to the lockup.”

  By the end of that day, Adelia had changed. Perhaps it was anger at Emma Bloat’s rape.

  Perhaps it was anger at the attempt on Dakers’s life. Perhaps it was the courage inspired by Mother Edyve.

  Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t cower in the guesthouse anymore while murderers and abductors went unchecked.

  In essence, the killer of Rosamund and Bertha had made a contract with her: Leave me alone and your child is safe.

  A shameful contract. Nevertheless, she would have abided by it, taking it as a given that he would not kill again.

  But he’d tossed a burning rag through an aperture as if the living woman inside was rubbish.

  I can’t allow that, she told him.

  She was afraid, very afraid indeed; her baby would have to be protected as no child ever had been, but she, Adelia, could not live, her daughter could not live, at the cost of other people’s deaths.

  “Where you going?” Gyltha called after her.

  “I’m going to ask questions.”

  She found Jacques in the cloister, being taught how to play the viol by one of the troubadours.

  The courtiers were colonizing the place. And the nuns, she thought, are now too intimidated by everything that has happened to stop them.

  She dragged the unwilling messenger away toward the almonry and sat him and herself down on a mounting block.

  “Yes, mistress?”

  “I want you to help me find out who ordered the killing of Talbot of Kidlington.”

  He was set aback. “I don’t know as I’m up to that, mistress.”

  She ignored him and recounted the list of those she suspected: “Wolvercote, Master Warin, the gatekeeper, and the Bloats.” She went into detail.

  He rubbed his chin; it was closely shaved now, like all the young men’s at Eleanor’s court.

  “I can tell you one thing, if it helps,” he said. “Lawyer Warin made a to-do when he was introduced to my lord Wolvercote in church. ‘So honored to make your acquaintance, my lord. We have not met, but I have long wished to know ...’ He made a point of it—I was there and heard him. If he mentioned that they had not encountered each other before, he must have said it three or four times.”

  “How did Wolvercote greet Master Warin?”

  “Like he treats everybody, as if he’d been squirted out of a backside.” He grimaced, afraid of having offended her. “Sorry, mistress.”

  “But you believe Warin was insisting they hadn’t met before when, really, they had?”

  Jacques thought about it. “Yes, I do.”

  Adelia was shivering. Ward had crept under her skirts and was pressing against her knees for warmth. A gargoyle on the gutter of the abbess’s house opposite gaped at her, its chin bearded with icicles.

  I am watching you.

  She said, “Emma thought kindly of Master Warin, which means that Talbot did, too, which also means the boy trusted him ...”

  “And confided his intention to elope?” The messenger was becoming interested.

  “I know he did,” she said. “Emma told me so. The boy told Warin he was choosing his birthday as the day for the elopement so that he could take possession of his inheritance ...”

  “Which, unbeknownst, Master Warin had squandered ...” This was exciting.

  Adelia nodded. “Which, indeed, Master Warin may have squandered, thereby necessitating his young cousin’s removal ... ”

  “... and it dawns on Master Warin that he has an ally in Lord Wolvercote. Old Wolfie will be deprived of a bride and a fortune if the elopement goes ahead.”

  “Yes. So he approaches Lord Wolvercote and suggests Talbot should die.”

  They sat back to think it through.

  “Why was it so urgent that Talbot’s body be identified right away?” Adelia wondered.

  “That’s easy, mistress. Lawyer Warin may be pressed for money—he looks a man who likes to live well. If he’s Talbot’s heir, it would take too long to prove to a coroner that the estate of the anonymous corpse was his. That takes a long time. Courts are slow. His creditors would come in before he inherited.”

  “And it would suit Wolvercote for Emma to realize that her lover was dead. Yes, it’s all of a piece,” she said. “It was Wolvercote who provided the killers. Warin probably didn’t know any.”

  “And got rid of them once they’d done the deed. It could be so, mistress.”

  Talking it over had hardened the case for Adelia, turning theory to reality. Two men had conspired to blot out a young life. Wickedness was discussed in lawyers’ offices as business, considered in manor houses over a flagon of wine; men were instructed in it. Normality, goodness were commodities to be traded for greed. Innocence was helpless against it. She was helpless against it. It gibbered at her from the rooftops.

  “How to prove it, though?” Jacques asked.

  “Plotters distrust one another,” she said. “I think it can be done, but I shall need you to help me.”

  She let him go then, and hurried back to the guesthouse, unable to shake off her fear for Allie.

  “Right as a shilling,” Gyltha said. “Look at her.” But Adelia knew that Gyltha, too, was afraid, because she’d told Mansur to move in with them, day and night.

  “Anyone as doesn’t like it can go and ... well, you know what,” she said. “So you do what you got to do. Mansur’s on guard.”

  But so was the killer ...

  Now she had to go and see Father Paton.

  This time she did it carefully, waiting until night, watching for watchers, slipping from shadow to shadow until she was protected by the narrow walk that led to the warming room stairs.

  Sister Lancelyne was at Vespers, and the little priest was alone, poring over the cartulary by candlelight, none too pleased to be interrupted.

  Adelia told him everything, everything, beginning with finding Talbot’s body on the bridge—the little priest might have missed it while he’d been keeping warm in the cart—proceeding to the happenings at Wormhold, to the return to Godstow and the death of Bertha, her suspicions of who did what, the threat to Allie, the threat to Dame Dakers.

  He didn’t want to hear it. He kept shifting and glancing longingly at the documents open in front of him. This was a tale reeking of the cardinal sins, and Father Paton preferred humanity in the abstract. “Are you certain?” he kept asking. “Surely not. How dare you reckon such things?”

  Adelia persisted, skewering him with logic like a pin through a butterfly. She didn’t like him much; he didn’t like her at all, but he was separated from the battle in which she was engaged, and his mind was like one of his own ledgers; she needed it as a register.

  “You must keep it all very, very secret,” she told him. “Mention it to nobody except the king.” This bloodless little man had to be the repository of her knowledge so that, in the event of her death, he could pass it on to Henry Plantagenet. “When the king comes, he will know what to do.”

  “But I do not.”

  “Yes, you do.” And she told him what it was that he must look for.

  “This is impudence.” He was shocked. “In any case, I doubt that, even if it is extant, it will prove your case.”

  Adelia doubted it, too, but it was all she had in her armory. She attempted an encouragement that she didn’t feel. “The king will come,” she said, “and he will prevail in the end.” That was her only certainty. Eleanor might be extraordinary, but she had pitted herself against one who straddled his kingdom like a colossus; she could not win.

  There Father Paton agreed with her. “Yes, yes,” he said, “a queen is only a woman, unable to fight any cause successfully, let alone her own. All
she may expect is God’s punishment for rebelling against her rightful lord.”

  He turned on Adelia. “You, too, mistress, are a mere woman, sinful, impertinent, and right or wrong, you should not be questioning your betters.”

  She held her temper and instead dangled a carrot. “When the king does come,” she said, “he’ll want to know who murdered Rosamund. There will be advancement for the man that can tell him who it was.”

  She watched the priest’s mouth purse as he entered possible promotion to an abbacy, even a bishopric, into a mental balance sheet against the risk and lèse-majesté of what he was being asked to do.

  “I suppose I shall be serving God, who is all truth,” he said slowly.

  “You will,” she said, and left him to get on with it.

  And then it was Christmas.

  The church was so packed with bodies for Angel Mass that it was actually hot, and the smell of humanity threatened to overwhelm the fresh, bitter scent of holly and ivy garlands.

  Adelia almost sweltered in her beaver cloak. She kept it on because, underneath, she was wearing the bliaut that Eleanor’s seamstresses had finished just in time and knew that she looked so nice in it, with all the other trimmings the queen had given her, that she felt she would attract attention.

  “You show yourself,” Gyltha had protested. “You don’t look half bad.” Which, from her, was praise.

  But the instinct to keep out of the killer’s eye was still strong. Perhaps she would take off her cloak at the coming feast; perhaps she wouldn’t.

  The choir stalls, once more reserved for the nuns, provided a black-and-white edging to the embroidered, bedecked altar with its blaze of candles and the robes of the abbot and two priests as they moved through the litany like glowing chess pieces.

  The magic was infallible.

  The queue for Communion included murderous men, hostile factions, every gamut of human weakness and sorrow, yet, as it moved quietly forward, it was gripped by the same awe. At the rail, the miller knelt beside one of the men who had belabored him. Adelia received the host from the Abbot of Eynsham, whose hands rested for a second in blessing on the head of Baby Allie. The cup passed from a Wolvercote mercenary to one of Schwyz’s before each lumbered back to his place, chewing and exalted.

  There was common and growing breathlessness as Mary labored in her stable a few yards away. The running footfalls of the shepherds came nearer and nearer. Angels chanted above the starlit, snowstacked church roof.

  When the abbot, raising his arms, announced a deep-throated “The Child is born,” his exhortation to go in peace was lost in a great shout of congratulation, several of the women yelling advice on breast-feeding to the invisible but present Mary and prompting her to “make sure and wrap that baby up warm now.”

  Bethlehem was here. It was now.

  As Adelia filed into the great barn, Jacques pushed through the crowd to touch her shoulder. “The queen’s greeting, mistress, and she will be disappointed if you are not wearing the gifts she gave you.”

  Reluctantly, Adelia took off her cloak with its hood, revealing the bliaut and the barbette, and felt naked. Walt, who was beside her, looked at her and stared. “Wondered who this stranger was,” he said. She supposed that, too, was a compliment. And indeed, she received a lot of surprised looks—most of them friendly. For this was another gift Eleanor had, unconsciously, given her; by showing her favor, the queen had cleansed her of the taint of witchcraft.

  Though Eleanor and her court had made plans for its entertainments, the feast in the barn was expropriated by the English.

  Expropriated? It was run away with.

  Charming Aquitanian carols were drowned in roaring wassails as the flaming Yule log, dragged in on the end of a harness by an ox, was set on a hearth in the middle of the great square formed by the tables in the barn. A minstrel in the gallery— actually, the hayloft—tried singing to the diners, but since, it turned out, all the convent’s people and most of the village had been invited and were making too much noise to hear him, he gave up and descended to eat with the rest.

  It was a Viking meal. Meat and more meat. The icehouse had yielded its best. Eleanor’s cook had, literally, battled for his art in the kitchen, but his winter sallats and frumenty, his pretty painted pastry castles and delicate flower-water jellies had been so overwhelmed and dripped on by lard and blood-gravy that he’d been taken poorly and now sat staring into space as his apprentice popped comforting little squares of roast pork into his mouth.

  There were no courses, either. The convent servants had coped for too long with Godstow’s overflowing and demanding guests, and the advent of Christmas had worked them even harder. They’d spent the last few days in the scorching heat of cooking fires and in decorating the barn until it resembled a glade in a forest; they weren’t bloody going to miss the feast for which they’d sweated by running back and forth to the kitchens. Everything they’d cooked—savory, sweet, sauced, plain, breads and pudding—was dumped on the tables in one glorious heap while they clambered onto the benches nearest the barn doors to enjoy it.

  This was a good thing; there was so much carving to be done at once, so much handing of dishes up and down the tables, so many shouts back and forth for “some of that stuffing for my lady,” “a slice off the gander, if you please,” “pass up the turnip mash, there” that a camaraderie of gustation grew between high and low, though it did not extend to the dogs waiting under the tables for scraps and squabbling when one fell their way.

  Ward kept close to Adelia’s knees, where he was fed royally—his mistress was a small eater and, in order not to offend Mansur, who was sitting beside her and kept heaping her platter, she secretly slipped hunks of meat to her dog.

  Eleanor, Adelia saw, was taking it all well. With good humor, the queen had put on the monstrous crown of ivy and bay leaves presented to her by the smith’s wife, thereby ruining her own simple headdress and adding to the growing paganism of the night by her sudden resemblance to an earth goddess.

  Apart from the royal cook, the only person to take no part in the jollity was Emma, a glacial, unmoving figure sitting next to her husband, who ignored her. Adelia tried to catch her eye, and then didn’t; the girl looked at nothing.

  How were Master and Mistress Bloat going to deal with the situation? Adelia wondered. Were they condemning the abduction of their daughter?

  No, they’d decided to overlook it. They’d placed themselves on the inner side of one of the tables opposite the abductor, though Wolvercote was rebuffing most of their attempts to engage him in conversation.

  Master Bloat even tried to stand up and make a toast to the happy couple, but the volume of noise increased alarmingly as he did so, and Emma, coming to life for the first time, regarded her father with a look so bitter that the man’s words withered in his mouth and he sat down again.

  With Mansur on her left and Allie tied firmly in a sling to her hip—there was to be no more abduction of daughters—Adelia turned her attention to the man on her right. She had taken pains to get a seat next to him.

  Master Warin had kept to himself until now, and the fact that he had to ask her, politely, who she was and did not react unfavorably when she told him her name showed that he had been isolated from convent gossip.

  He had a nervous habit of licking his lips and had none of the smooth superiority of most lawyers, an unremarkable person who’d softened but did not try to hide a strong Gloucestershire accent. Adelia got the impression that gaining legal qualification had been hard for him, both financially and intellectually, and that he confined himself to consilio et auxilio, advising on wills, assarts, boundary disputes, contracts of service, all the minutiae of everyday law, though important enough to those involved with them.

  When she commiserated with him on the death of his young cousin, he wet his lips again and real tears came into his shortsighted eyes: The murder had bereft him of family, he told her, since he had no wife as yet. “How I envy you this bonny lit
tle girl, mistress. I would dearly like children.”

  Adelia had built a case against the lawyer. She had to keep reminding herself that somebody had passed on the information that led to killers waiting on the bridge for Talbot of Kidlington, and none was more likely than this little man, who said of Talbot, “We were closer than cousins. He was my younger brother after his parents died. I looked after him in everything.”

  But while it was modest, his clothing was of a quality not to be expected of a family lawyer, and the large seal ring on his finger was entirely of gold; Master Warin did himself well. Also, his taste did not run to mead and ale; his grabs at the wine jug as it was passed round were frequent.

  Adelia applied the spur. “Your cousin didn’t confide to you his intention to run away with Mistress Bloat, then?” she asked.

  “Of course not.” Master Warin’s voice became sharp. “A lunatic idea. I would have dissuaded him from it. Lord Wolvercote is an important man. I would not have him shamed by one of my family.”

  He was lying. Emma had said he’d been part of the elopement conspiracy.

  “Did you know him, then? Wolvercote?”

  “I did not.” Master Warin’s tongue wriggled around his lips. “We met in church the other night for the first time.”

  Lying again. This was her man.

  “I’d only wondered if you knew what your cousin was planning, because people are saying that you came here hot on his heels ...”

  “Who says that?”

  “You arrived at the abbey so soon after ...”

  “That is a calumny. I was worried for my cousin traveling in the snow. Who are these slanderers? Who are you? I don’t need to sit here ...” His tongue flickering like a snake’s, Master Warin grabbed his wine cup and moved away to find a seat farther down the table.

  Mansur turned his head to watch the lawyer’s agitated progress. “Did he kill the boy?” he asked in Arabic.

  “In a way. He told Wolvercote so that Wolvercote could kill him.”