The Serpent's Tale (22 page)

“I hate you,” she told him. Tears were freezing on her eyelashes.

“I know. Cut the bloody rope.”

Holding the knife, she slid her right arm farther around him, all the time watching the man in the prow, wondering why she didn’t alert him so that Rowley would be restrained….

She couldn’t. She didn’t know what fate Eleanor intended for her prisoner or, even it was a benign one, what Eynsham or Schwyz might do.

Her fingers found his hands and walked their way to the rope round his wrists. She began cutting, carefully—the knife was so sharp that a wrong move could open one of his veins.

One strand severed, another. As she worked, she hissed bile. “Your leman, am I? No use to you, am I? I hope you freeze in hell—and Henry with you.”

The last strand went, and she felt him flex his hands to get their circulation back.

He turned his head so that he could kiss her. His chin scraped her cheek.

“No use at all,” he said, “except to make the sun come up.”

And he was gone.

J
acques took charge. Adelia heard him put a sob into his voice, telling the furious Cross that the collision with the bank had caused the bishop to fall overboard.

She heard the mercenary’s reply: “He’s dead meat, then.”

Jacques burst into a loud wail but smoothly took Ward off Adelia’s lap, shifted her so that she sat between him and Walt with the sleeping Dakers resting on her back, and returned the dog to its place under her cloak.

She was barely aware of the change.
Except to make the sun come up.

I’ll make the sun come up if I see him again. I’ll kill him. Dear Lord, keep him safe.

The snow stopped, and the heavy clouds that carried it rolled away westward. The sun came out and Cross rolled back the sail, thinking there was warmth to be had.

Adelia took no notice of that, either, until Walt nudged her. “What’s up with he, mistress?”

She raised her head. The two mercenaries were sitting on the prow thwart opposite. The one called Cross was trying to rouse his companion. “Come on, Giorgio, upsy-daisy. Weren’t your fault we lost the bloody bishop. Come on, now.”

“He’s dead,” Adelia told him. The man’s boots were fixed in the solidified bilge water. Just another frozen corpse to add to the night’s list.

“Can’t be.
Can’t
be. I kept him in the warm, well, warm as I could.” Cross’s bad-tempered face was agonized.

Lord, this death is important to this man. It should be important to me.

For the look of the thing, Adelia stretched so that her hand rested against the dead man’s neck where a pulse should be. He was rigid. She shook her head. He’d been considerably older than his friend.

Jacques and Walt genuflected. She took the living soldier’s hand in one of hers. “I’m sorry, Master Cross.” She spoke the end words: “May God have mercy on his soul.”

“He was bloody sitting here, keeping warm, I thought.”

“I know. You did your best for him.”

“Why ain’t you lot dead, then?” Anger was returning. “You was sitting same as him.”

Useless to say that they had been bailing and therefore moving, just as Cross himself, who, even though exposed to the wind, had been active in preventing collision. And poor Giorgio had been alone, with no human warmth next to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “He was old, the cold was too much for him.”

Cross said, “Taught me soldiering, he did. We been through three campaigns together. Sicilian, he was.”

“So am I.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t move him,” she said sharply.

Cross was trying to gather the body up so as to lay it along the thwart. Like Rosamund’s, its rigor would persist until it encountered heat—there was none in this sun—and the sight of it on its back with knees and hands curved like a dog’s was not one its friend would want to see.

Walt said, “By Gor, ain’t that Godstow by there?”

Allie.

She realized that she was surrounded by a glittering, diamond-hard landscape that she had to shade her eyes to look at. Trees had been upended, their roots like ghastly, desperate, twiggy fingers frozen in the act of appeal. For the rest, the countryside appeared flattened by the monstrous weight of snow fallen on it so that what had been dips in the ground were merely smooth shallows among the rises they interspersed. Straight threads of smoke rising against a cornflower-blue sky showed that the lumps scattered on the rise above the bank were half-buried houses.

There was a small, humped bridge in the distance, white as marble; she and Rowley had stood on it one night in another century. Beyond that—she had to squeeze her eyes nearly shut to see—many threads of smoke and, where the bridge ended, a wood and the suggestion of gates.

She was opposite the village of Wolvercote. Over there, though she couldn’t see it, stood the nunnery of Godstow. Where Allie was.

Adelia stood, slipped, and rocked the boat in her scramble to get up again. “Put us ashore,” she told Cross, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Walt and Jacques pulled her down.

The galloper said, “No good, mistress, even supposing…”

“Look at the bank, mistress,” Walt told her.

She looked at it—a small cliff where flat pasture should have been. Farther in, what appeared to be enormous frozen bushes were, in fact, the spread branches of mature oak trees standing in drifts that must be—Adelia estimated—fifteen feet or more deep.

“We’d never get through,” Jacques was saying.

She pleaded, begged, while knowing it was true; perhaps when the inhabitants disinterred themselves, they would dig tunnels through the snow to reach the river, but until then, or until it thawed, she was separated from the convent as if by a mountain barrier. She would have to sit in this boat and be swept away past Allie, only God knowing how or when, or
if
, she could get back to her.

They’d passed the village now. They were nearly at the bridge that crossed the tributary serving the mill. The Thames was widening into the great sweep that would take it around the convent’s meadows.

And something was happening to it….

The barge had slowed. Its sides were too high to see what was occurring on its deck, but there was activity and a lot of swearing.

“What’s the matter?”

Walt picked up one of the bailers, dipped it over the side, brought it back, and stirred his finger in it. “Look at this.”

They looked. The cupped water was gray and granulated, as if somebody had poured salt into it. “What is it?”

“It’s ice,” Walt said softly. “It’s bloody ice.” He looked around. “Must be shallower here. It’s ice, that’s what it is. The river’s freezing up.”

Adelia stared at it, then up at Walt, then back to the river. She sat down suddenly and gave thanks for a miracle as wonderful as any in the Bible; liquid was turning solid, one element changing into another. They would
have
to stop. They could walk ashore and, many as they were, they could dig their way through to the convent.

She looked back to count the boats behind them.

There were no boats. As far as the eye could see, the river was empty, graying along this stretch but gaining a blueness as it twisted away into a dazzling, silent distance.

Blinking, she searched for a sight of the contingent that should have been accompanying them along the towpath.

But there was no towpath—of course there wasn’t. Instead, where it had been, was a wavy, continuous bank of frozen snow, taller than two men in some places, with its side edge formed by wind and water as neatly as if some titanic pastry cook with a knife had sheared off the ragged bits of icing round the top of a cake.

For a second, because her mind was directed only at reaching her daughter, Adelia thought,
It doesn’t matter, there are enough of us to dig a path….

And then, “Dear Lord, where are they?” she said. “All those people?”

The sun went on shining beautifully, unfairly, pitilessly, on an empty river where, perhaps, in its upper reaches men and women sat in their boats as unmoving as Giorgio sat in this one, where, perhaps, corpses rolled in sparkling water.

And what of the riders? Where were they, God help them? Where was Rowley?

The answering silence was terrible because it was the only answer. It trapped the oaths and grunts of effort from the barge as if in a bell jar, so that they echoed back in an otherwise soundless air.

The men on board it labored on, plunging poles through the shallow, thickening water until they found purchase on the river bottom and could push the barge another yard, another…

After a while, the bell jar filled with sounds like the cracks of whips—they were encountering surface sheet ice and having to break through it.

They inched past the point of the river where it divided and a stream turned off toward the mill and the bridge. There was no noise from the millrace, where a fall of water hung in shining stillness.

And, oh, God Almighty save our souls
, in all this wonder, somebody had used the bridge as a gibbet; two glistening, distorted figures hung from it by the neck—Adelia, looking up, glimpsed two dead faces looking quizzically sideways and down at her, saw two pairs of pointing feet, as if their owners had been frozen in a neat little dancing jump.

Nobody else seemed to notice, or care. Walt and Jacques were using the oars to pole the rowing boat along so that it didn’t drag on the barge. Dakers sat next to her now, her hood over her face; somebody had placed the sail around the two of them to keep them warm.

They inched past the bridge and into an even wider bend where the Thames ran along a Godstow meadow—which, astonishingly, still
was
a meadow. Some freak of the wind had scoured it of snow so that a great expanse of frosted grass and earth provided the only color in a white world.

And here the barge stopped because the ice had become too thick to proceed farther. It didn’t matter,
it didn’t matter
—there was a scar leading down the rise from the convent to the shore and, at the bottom of it, convent men with shovels were shouting and waving, and everybody in the two boats was shouting and waving back as if it were they who were marooned and had glimpsed a rescuing sail coming toward them….

Only then did Adelia realize that she had been sustained through the night on borrowed energy and it was now being debited out of her body so quickly that she was close to the languor that comes with death. It had been a very near thing.

They had to disembark onto ice and cross it to reach land. Ward’s paws slipped and he went down, sliding, until he could scrabble resentfully up again. An arm went round Adelia’s waist to help her along and she looked up into the face of Mansur. “Allah is merciful,” he said.

“Somebody is,” she said. “I was so frightened for you. Mansur, we’ve lost Rowley.”

Half-carried, she stumbled across the ice beside him and then across the flattened grass of the meadow.

Among the small crowd ahead, she glimpsed Eleanor’s upright figure before it disappeared into the tunnel that led up to the convent gates, a steep, thin pathway with walls twice head height on either side. It had been dug to take Rosamund’s coffin; instead, it received a litter made out of oars and wrapped around with sailcloth, under which rested the contorted body of a mercenary soldier.

A beautiful tunnel, though. At its top stood an elderly woman, her studied impassivity displaying her relief. “You took your time.”

As Adelia fell, babbling, into her arms, Gyltha said, “A’course she’s well. Fat and fit as a flea. Think as I can’t look after her? Gor dang, girl, you only left her yesterday.”

I
f her heart sank at the prospect of feeding and housing the forty or so exhausted, bedraggled, frostbitten men, women, and dogs shambling through her gates, Mother Edyve gave no sign of it, though it must have sunk further when she saw that they included the Queen of England and the Abbot of Eynsham, neither of them friends to Godstow, to say nothing of a troop of mercenary soldiers.

It didn’t occur to her that she was welcoming a force of occupation.

She ordered hot possets for her guests. She surrendered her house to Queen Eleanor and her maids, lodged the abbot and Montignard in the men’s guesthouse with their and the queen’s male servants, and quartered Schwyz on the gatekeeper. She put the queen’s dogs and hawks in her own kennels and mews, distributing the other mercenaries as widely as she could, billeting one on the smith, another in the bakery, and the rest among individual—and aged—retainers and pensioners in the houses that formed a small village within the convent walls.

“So’s they’m split up and not one of ’em where there’s girls,” Gyltha said approvingly. “She’s a wily one, that Ma Edyve.”

It was Gyltha who had carried the report of the events at Wormhold to the abbess. Adelia was too tired and, anyway, hadn’t been able to face telling her of Rowley’s death.

“She don’t believe it,” Gyltha said on her return. “No more don’t I. Now, then, let’s be seeing to you two.”

Mansur hated fuss and kept declaring that he was well, but he had been exposed to the open cold while poling the barge as Adelia, Jacques, and Walt had not, and she and Gyltha were worried about him.

“Look what you done to your hands, you great gawk,” Gyltha said—her disquiet always took the form of anger. Mansur’s palms were bleeding where his mittens, and then his skin, had worn through against the wood of the pole.

Adelia was concerned more for his fingers, which were white and shiny where they emerged from the wrecked mittens. “Frostbite.”

“They cause me no pain,” Mansur said stolidly.

“They will in a minute,” Adelia promised.

Gyltha ran to Mansur’s lodging to get him a dry gown and cloak, and brought back with her a bucket of hot water from the kitchen and would have plunged her lover’s hands into it, but Adelia stopped her. “Wait til it cools a little.”

She also prevented Gyltha from hooking the brazier nearer to him. The condition of frostbite had interested her foster father after he’d seen the effects of it during their holidays in the Alps—he had actually braved a winter there to study it—and his conclusion had been that the warming must be gradual.

Young Allie, always deprived of burning herself on the brazier—it was kept within a guard—turned her attention to trying to pull the bucket over her head. Adelia would have enjoyed watching the resulting tussle between Gyltha and that remarkable child if her own toes hadn’t ached agonizingly with the return of blood to frozen muscle and bone.

She estimated the worth of dosing herself and Mansur with willow-bark decoction for the pain and then rejected it; each of them was a stoic, and the fact that her toes and his fingers were turning red without blistering indicated that the affliction was mild—better to keep the drug for those in whom it might be worse.

She crawled onto the bed to suffer in comfort. Ward leaped on after her, and she had neither the energy nor will to turn him off. The dog had shared his body heat with her on the boat—what were a few fleas if she shared hers with him?

“What did you do with Dakers?” she asked.

“Oh, her.” Gyltha had not taken to the walking skeleton that Adelia had dragged, unaware that she
was
dragging it, through the convent gates, but had seen,
because
Adelia was dragging it, that there was a necessity to keep it alive. “I give her to Sister Havis, and she give her to Sister Jennet in the infirmary. She’s all right, ugly thing.”

“Well done.” Adelia closed her eyes.

“Don’t you want to know who’s turned up here since you been away?”

“No.”

W
hen she woke up, it was afternoon. Mansur had gone back to the men’s guesthouse to rest. Gyltha was sitting beside the bed, knitting—a skill she’d picked up from one of her Scandinavian customers during her eel-selling days.

Adelia’s eyes rested on the chubby little figure of Allie as it hitched itself around the floor on its bottom, chasing the dog and grimacing to show the one tiny tooth that had manifested itself in her lower gum since her mother had last seen her. “I swear I’ll never leave you again,” she told her.

Gyltha snorted. “I keep telling you, ’twas only thirty hours.”

But Adelia knew the separation had been longer than that. “It was nearly permanent,” she’d said, and added painfully, “For Rowley, it has been.”

Gyltha wouldn’t countenance it. “He’ll be back, large as life and twice as natural. Take more than a bit of old snow to finish off that lad.” To Gyltha, the Right Reverend Lord Bishop of Saint Albans would always be “that lad.”

“He can stay away for me,” Adelia said. She clung on to her grievance against him like a raft to keep her from being subsumed in grief. “He didn’t care, Gyltha, not for his life, not Allie’s, not mine.”

“Except to make the sun come up.”

“A’course he didn’t, he’s out to stop a war as’ll take more lives than yours. God’s work that is, and the Lord’ll watch over un according.”

Adelia clung to that, too, but she had been deeply frightened. “I don’t care, if it’s God’s work, let Him do it. We are leaving. As soon as the snow clears, we’re all slipping away back to the fens.”

“Oh, ar?” Gyltha said.

“It’s not
‘oh, ar.’
I mean it.” In the fens, her life had been acceptable, regulated, useful. She’d been ripped away from it, subjected to, and then abandoned in, physical and mental turmoil by the man
at whose request
she had become embroiled in it in the first place. Almost worse than anything, he had revived in her an emotion that she’d thought to be dead, that was better dead.

“Except to make the sun come up.”

Damn him, don’t think of it.

Gaining anger, she said, “It’s all high politics, anyway. That’s what Rosamund’s killing was, as far as I can see—an assassination to do with queens and kings and political advantage. It’s outside my scope. Was it the mushrooms? Yes, it probably was. Do I know who sent them? No, I don’t, and there’s an end to it. I’m a doctor, I won’t be drawn into their wars. God’s rib, Gyltha, Eleanor abducted me,
abducted
me—I nearly ended up joining her damned army.”

“Shouldn’t have saved her life, then, should you?”

“What was I to do? Dakers was coming at her with a knife.”

“You sure you don’t want to know who else’s turned up?”

“No. I only want to know whether anybody’s likely to stop us going.”

But it appeared that in the physical collapse affecting all the travelers, even Eleanor, on their arrival at the convent, nobody had spared a thought for the woman who had saved the queen’s life—or, for that matter, the woman who had nearly taken it. The priority had been a place to get warm and to sleep.

Perhaps, Adelia thought, the queen had forgotten Dakers and herself altogether and, when the roads were open again, would proceed to Oxford without attending to either. By which time Adelia would be beyond reach, taking Gyltha, Mansur, and Allie with her and leaving Dame Dakers to her own hideous devices—she no longer cared what they were.

Gyltha went to fetch their supper from the kitchen.

Adelia leaned down from the bed, picked up her daughter, pressing her nose against the warm satin of the child’s cheek, and propped her up against her own knees so that they faced each other.

“We’re going home, aren’t we, mistress? Yes, we are. We won’t get involved in their old wars, will we? No, we won’t. We’ll go far off, we’ll go back to Salerno, we don’t care what that nasty old King Henry says, do we? We’ll find the money from somewhere. It’s no good making faces….” For Allie was extending her lower lip and showing her new tooth in an expression reminiscent of the camel in Salerno’s menagerie. “You’ll like Salerno, it’s warm. We’ll take Mansur and Gyltha and Ulf, yes, we will. You miss Ulf, don’t you? So do I.”

On an investigation like this—
had
she been going to proceed with it—Gyltha’s grandson would have been her eyes and ears, able to go about unremarked as only an eleven-year-old urchin could, his plain, very plain, features giving the lie to his extreme intelligence.

Nevertheless, Adelia thanked her God that Ulf, at least, was out of harm’s way. She found herself wondering, though, what the boy would have said about the situation….

Allie started wriggling, wanting to continue with her persecution of Ward, so Adelia set her down absently, listening to a harsh little voice in her head that asked questions like an insistent crow.

Two murders, ain’t there? Rosamund’s and the fella on the bridge? You think they’re connected?

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” she answered out loud.

It was goin’ to depend on who turned up, weren’t it? Somebody was, to see why there hadn’t been no fuss about the dead un on the bridge? Whoever done it wanted him dead, din’t they? An’ wanted a hullabaloo about it, din’t they?

“Such was my assumption. But there hasn’t been time, the snow would have delayed them.”

Somebody’s come.

“I don’t care. I’m going home, I’m frightened.”

Leavin’ the poor bugger in the icehouse, is that it? Very godly, I’m sure.

“Oh, shut up.”

Adelia liked order; in a sense, it was what her profession was about—and you could say this for the dead, they didn’t make unexpected moves or threaten you with a knife. To be out of control and at the whim of others, especially the malignantly inclined, as she had been at Wormhold and on the river, had discomposed her very being.

The convent enfolded her; the long, low, plain room spoke soothingly of proportion. It was dark outside now, and the glow of the brazier gave a shadow to each of the beams in the ceiling, making a pleasingly uniform pattern of dark and not-so-dark stripes against white plaster. Even muffled by the wool that Gyltha had stuffed in the cracks of the shutters to keep out the cold, the distant sound of the nuns singing Vespers was a reassurance of a thousand years of disciplined routine.

And all of it an illusion, because a corpse lay in its icehouse and, seven miles away, a dead woman sat at a writing table, both of them waiting…for what?

Resolution.

Adelia pleaded with them:
I can’t give it to you, I’m frightened, I want to go home.

But jagged, almost forgotten images kept nudging at her mind: snowy footprints on a bridge, a letter crumpled in a saddlebag, other letters, copied letters, Bertha’s piglike nose snuffling at a scent….

Gyltha returned carrying a large pot of mutton and vegetables in broth, some spoons, a loaf tucked under one arm, and a leather bottle of ale under the other. She poured some of the broth into Allie’s bowl and began mashing it to a pulp, putting the pieces of meat into her mouth and chewing them with her big, strong teeth until they, too, were pulp, then returning them to the bowl. “Turnip and barley,” she said. “I’ll say this much for the sisters, they do a fair supper. And good, warm milk from the cow with little un’s porridge this morning.”

Reluctantly, because to mention one of the convent’s problems was somehow to solidify it, Adelia asked, “Is Bertha still in the cowshed?”

“Won’t come out, poor soul. That old Dakers still want to scrag her?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

Feeding Allie, who was making spirited attempts to feed herself, took concentration that allowed no thought for anything else.

When they’d wiped food off her hair as well as off their own, the child was put down to sleep and the two women ate their supper in silence, their feet stretched out to the brazier, passing the ale bottle back and forth between them.

Warm, the pain beginning to lessen, Adelia thought that such security as there was in her world rested at this moment in the gaunt old woman on the stool opposite hers. A day didn’t go by without a reminder of the gratitude she owed to Prior Geoffrey for their introduction, nor a strike of fear that Gyltha might leave her, nor, for that matter, puzzlement at why she stayed.

Adelia said, “Do you mind being here, Gyltha?”

“Ain’t got no choice, girl. We’m snowed up. Been snowing again, if you’d notice. Path down to the river’s gone and blocked itself again.”

“I mean, galloping across country to get here, away from home, murder…everything. You never complain.”

Gyltha picked a strand of mutton from her teeth, considered it, and popped it back into her mouth. “Somewhere to see, I suppose,” she said.

Perhaps that was it. Women generally had to stay where they were put, which in Gyltha’s case had been Cambridgeshire fenland, a place that Adelia found endlessly exotic but that was undoubtedly very flat. Why should not Gyltha’s heart drum to adventure in foreign places like any crusader’s? Or long to see God’s peace retained in her country as much as Rowley did? Or require, despite the risk, to see God’s justice done on those who killed?