The Serpent's Tale (39 page)

“I know, I know.” The abbot nodded. “These things are upsetting, but I have no wish to lose the queen’s esteem, and I fear Father Paton could disabuse her of it. Did you provide him with my text on which dear Rosamund based her letters? Of course you did. What an enterprising little soul you are.”

He was talking. He’d condemned the priest to death and he was talking, amused.

“Since I stand in high regard with our blessed Eleanor, it would be—what is the word?—
inconvenient
if she knew I was the goad that pricked her into further rebellion. In view of my desertion, she might tell Henry. As it is, she will be informed of a murderous intruder to the abbey, d’ye see, and that we, the good Schwyz and myself, are in brave pursuit to stop him before he reaches the king’s lines. In fact, of course, we are leaving the lady to her inevitable fate; the snow has proved too much for us, the amiable Lord Wolvercote too little…. As Master Schwyz says of that gentleman in his rough way—he couldn’t fight a sack of shit.”

Schwyz had let go of her and was walking toward Father Paton.

Adelia closed her eyes.
God, I beg you.

A whimper from Father Paton, a hot smell. A hush, as if even this company was awed by the passage of a soul to its maker.

Then somebody said something, somebody else laughed. Men began carrying bundles and crates out to the porch and down to the river.

The abbot’s finger went under Adelia’s chin and tilted her head.

“You interest me, madam, you always have. How does a foreign slut like yourself command the attention not only of a bishop but a king? And you, forgive me, without an apparent grace to bless yourself with.”

Keeping her eyes closed, she jerked away from him, but he grasped her face and angled it back and forth. “Do you satisfy them both? At the same time? Are you a mistress of threesomes? Do you excel at
lit à trois
? Cock below and behind? Arsehole and
pudendum muliebre
? What my father in his elegant way used to call a bum-
and
-belly?”

There would be a lot of this before the end, she thought.

She looked straight into his eyes.

Great God, he’s a virgin.

How she knew it in that extremity…but she knew it.

The face above hers diminished into an agonized, pleading vulnerability—
Don’t know me, don’t know me
—before it resumed the trompe l’oeil that was the Abbot of Eynsham.

Schwyz had been shouting at them both; now he came and hauled Adelia upright. “She better be no trouble,” he said. “We got enough to carry.”

“I am
sure
she won’t be.” The abbot smiled on Adelia. “We could send to the kitchen for the baby if you prefer and take it with us, though whether it would survive the journey…”

She shook her head.

Eynsham, still smiling, gestured toward the door. “After you, mistress.”

She went through it and down the ice steps like a lamb.

T
he moon had edged a little toward the west, so that two more cloaked mercenaries cast long, sharp, stunted shadows on the ice as they loaded a large sledge with the packages the others were bringing down. One of them picked up Adelia and slung her on top of the bundles, hurting her arms as she landed on them. Somebody else slung a tarpaulin over her, and she had to toss her head round until a fold fell back and she could see.

Go south,
she thought.
Make them go south, Henry’s there. Lord, make them go south.

The abbot, Schwyz, and some of the other men were clustered around her, balancing against the sides of the sledge as they put on skates, intent, not talking.

They
have
to go south—they don’t know the king’s attacking Oxford.

Oh, but of course they did. They knew everything—Rowley had inadvertently told them.

Lord, send them south.

The abbot made experimental pirouettes on the ice, admiring his shadow in the steel mirror of the river. “Yes, yes,” he said. “One never forgets.”

He paid no attention to Adelia—she was luggage now. He nodded at Schwyz, who nodded at his men. Two mercenaries picked up trails of harness leading from the sledge and heaved themselves into the straps. Somebody else mounted the sledge’s running board behind Adelia and grasped the guiding struts.

The abbot looked up at the convent walls lowering above him. “Queen Eleanor, sweet broken reed, farewell.
Veni, vidi, vadi
,” then raised his eyes to the star-sprinkled sky. “Well, well, on to better things. Let us go.”

“And quiet about it,” Schwyz said.

The sledge hissed as it moved.

They headed north.

Adelia retched into her gag. Nothing to stop him from killing her now.

For a while, she was so afraid that she could hardly see. He was going to kill her.
Had
to kill her.

Appalling sadness overtook her. Images of Allie missing her, growing up without her, small, needy.
I’ll die loving you. Know it, little one, I never stopped loving you.

Then the guilt.
My fault, darling; a better mother would have passed it by, let them all slaughter one another—no matter, as long as you and I weren’t wrenched apart. My fault, my grievous fault.

On and on, grief and fear, fear and grief, as the untidy, white-edged banks slid by and the sledge whispered and grated and the men pulling it grunted with effort, their breath puffing wisps of smoke into the moonlight, taking her further and further into hell.

Discomfort forced itself on her attention—the bundle beneath her had spears in it. Also, the gag tasted abominable and her arms and wrists hurt.

Suddenly irritable, she shifted, sat up, and began to take notice.

Two mercenaries were pulling the sledge. Another was behind. Four skated on either side, Schwyz and the abbot ahead. Nine in all. None of them her friend Cross—she hadn’t been able to make out the faces of the two mercenaries packing the sledge, but both were thinner than Cross.

No help, then. Wherever they were headed, Schwyz was taking only his most trusted soldiers; he’d abandoned the others.

Where
are
we going? The Midlands?
There was still smoldering discontent against Henry Plantagenet in the Midlands.

Adelia shifted and began investigating the sacking with her wrists, tracing the spears in it along the shafts to their blades.

There.

She pressed down and felt a point prick into her right palm. She began trying to rub the rope against the side of the blade but kept missing it and encountering the spear point instead so that it went uselessly into the rope’s fibers and out again, an exercise that might eventually unpick them if she had a week or two to spare….

It was something to do, though, to fight off the inertia of despair. Of course Eynsham would have her killed. Her use to him as a bargaining counter would last only until he could be sure Henry wasn’t pursuing him—and the chance of that receded with every mile they went north. Most of all, he would kill her because she’d seen the worm wriggling in that brilliant, many-faceted, empty carapace, and he had seen her see it.

Her arms were becoming tired….

Tears still wet on her face, Adelia dozed.

It was heavy going for the men pulling the sledge, and even for those merely skating. Afraid of pursuit, they hadn’t lit torches, and though the moon was bright, the ice gave a deceptive, smooth sheen to branches and other detritus that had been frozen into it so that the mercenaries fell frequently or had to make detours round obstructions—occasionally heaving the sledge over them.

In her sleep, Adelia was vaguely aware of being rolled around during the portages and of muffled swearing, aware, too, that men were taking rests on the sledge, crawling under the tarpaulin with her to get their strength back before giving up their place to the next. There was nothing sexual in it—they were too exhausted—and she refused to wake up. Sleep was oblivion….

Another passenger came aboard, exhaling with the relief at being off the ice. Fingers fumbled at the back of her head and undid the gag. “No need for this now, mistress. Nor this.” Gently, somebody pushed her forward and a knife sawed at the rope round her wrists. “There. More comfy?”

There was a waft of sweet, familiar scent. Licking her mouth, Adelia flexed her shoulders and hands. They hurt. They were still traveling, and it was still very cold, but the stars had dulled a little; the moon shone through a light veil of mist.

“You didn’t need to kill Bertha,” she said.

There was a pause.

“I rather think I did,” Jacques said reasonably. “Her nose would have betrayed me sooner or later. I’m afraid the poor soul literally sniffed me out.”

Yes. Yes, she had.

Bertha crawling forward in the cowshed, snuffling, using the keenest sense she had to try and describe the old woman in the forest who’d given her the mushrooms for Rosamund.

“Smelled purty…like you.”

It wasn’t me, Bertha. It was the man standing behind me. “A him. Not a her.”

The girl had been sniffing the messenger’s scent—the perfume that was a feature of him even when he dressed up as an old woman picking mushrooms.

“Do you mind?” he asked now. It was solicitous, hoping she wasn’t upset. “She wasn’t much of a loss, really, was she?”

Adelia kept her eyes on the two mercenaries dragging the sledge.

Jacques tucked the tarpaulin round her and sat sideways to peer into her face, reasonable, explaining, no longer the wide-eyed young man with big ears, much older, at ease. She supposed that’s what he was, a shape-changer; he could be what he wanted when circumstances demanded.

He’d taken Allie in her cradle and put her on the step.

“Ordinarily, you see, there is no need for what I call auxiliary action, as there was in Bertha’s case,” he said. “Usually, one fulfills one’s contract and moves on. All very tidy. But this particular employment has been complicated—interesting, I don’t deny, but complicated.” He sighed. “Snowed up in a convent, not only with one’s employer but, as it turns out, a
witness
is not an experience one wants repeated.”

A killer.
The
killer.

“Yes, I see,” Adelia said.

After all, she’d lived with revulsion ever since she’d become aware that he’d poisoned Rosamund. To use him in the necessary business of getting Wolvercote and Warin to convict themselves in the church had been an exercise in terror, but she’d been unable to think of any other stratagem to placate him. By then she’d sniffed the mind that permeated the abbey with a greater menace than Wolvercote because it was free of limitation, a happy mind. Kill this one, spare that, remain guiltless.

It had been necessary to amuse it, like a wriggling mouse enthralling the cat. To gain time, she’d let it watch her play at solving the one murder of which it was innocent. To keep the cat’s teeth out of the neck of a mouse that asked questions.

She asked, “Did Eynsham order you to kill her?”

“Bertha? Lord, no.” He was indignant. “I do have initiative, you know. Mind you”—an elbow nudged Adelia’s ribs—“he’ll have to pay for her. She’ll go on his account.”

“His account,” she said, nodding.

“Indeed. I am not the abbot’s vassal, mistress. I really must make that clear; I am independent; I travel Christendom providing a service—not everybody approves of it, I know, but it is nevertheless a service.”

“An assassin.”

He considered. “I suppose so. I prefer to think of it as a profession like any other. Let’s face it, Doctor, your own business is termed witchcraft by those who don’t understand it, but we are both professionals pursuing a trade that neither of us can lay public claim to. We both deal in life and death.” But she’d touched his pride. “How did I give myself away? I did try to warn you against too much curiosity.”

His visits to Bertha, his constant proximity, the indefinable sense of menace that lurked in the cowshed when he was there. The scent that Bertha had recognized. A freedom to roam the abbey, unnoticed, that no one else possessed. In the end, he was the only one it could have been.

“The Christmas feast,” she said.

She’d known for sure then. In the capering, warty old woman of Noah’s ark, she’d recognized a grotesque of the crone that Bertha had seen in the forest.

“Ah,” he said. “I really should avoid dressing up, shouldn’t I? I have a weakness for it, I’m afraid.”

She asked, “When did Eynsham hire you to kill Rosamund?”

“Oh, ages ago,” he said. “I’d only recently come to England to pick up commissions. Well, I’ll tell you when it was; I’d just become the bishop’s messenger—in my line of work, it’s always useful to have a reason to travel the countryside. Incidentally, mistress, I hope I gave the bishop good service….” He was in earnest. “I like to think I’m an excellent servant, no matter what the work.”

Yes, excellent.
When Rowley had crept into the abbey and alerted his men, it hadn’t occurred to him that his messenger should not be informed of the coming attack along with the rest—not the irritating, willing Jacques, one of his own people.

“In fact, I shall miss working for Saint Albans,” he was saying now, “but as soon as Walt told me the king was coming, I had to inform Eynsham. I couldn’t let Master Abbot be taken, could I? He owes me money.”

“Is that how it goes?” she asked. “The word is spread? Assassin for hire?”

“Virtually, yes. I haven’t lacked employment so far. The contractor never likes to reveal himself, of course, but do you know how I found out this one was our abbot?”

The joy of it raised his voice, launching an owl off its tree and making Schwyz, up ahead, turn and swear at him. “Do you know how I recognized him? Guess.”

She shook her head.

“His boots. Master Abbot wears exceptionally fine boots, as I do. Oh, yes, and he addressed his servant as ‘my son,’ and I said to myself,

By the saints, here is a churchman, a rich churchman.
All I had to do was ask around Oxford’s best bootmakers. The problem, you see, is to get the other half of the fee, isn’t it?” He was sharing their occupational troubles. “So much as down payment, so much when the job’s done. They never like to pay the second installment, don’t you find that?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Well, I do. Getting the other half of the fee is why I’ve had to attach myself to my lord Eynsham like fish glue. Actually, in this instance, it isn’t his fault; circumstances have been against him: the retreat from Wormhold, the snow…but apparently we’re calling in at his abbey on the way north—that’s where he keeps the gold, in his abbey.”

“He’ll kill you,” she said. It was an observation to keep him talking; she didn’t mind one way or the other. “He’ll get Schwyz to cut your throat.”

“
Aren’t
they an interesting couple?
Doesn’t
Schwyz adore him? They met in the Alps, apparently. I have wondered whether they were…well,
you
know…but I think not, don’t you? I’d welcome your medical opinion….”

One of the mercenaries in harness was slowing down, wheeling his arm for the messenger to take his place.

The voice in Adelia’s ear became a confidential whisper, changing from a gossip’s to an assassin’s. “Don’t worry for me, mistress. Our abbot has too many enemies that need to be silenced
in
silence. Schwyz leaves a butcher’s trail behind. I don’t. No, no, my services will always be in demand. Worry for yourself.”

He threw back the tarpaulin in order to get off the sledge.

“Will it be you who kills me, Jacques?” she asked.

“I do hope not, mistress,” he said politely. “That would be a shame.”