The Serpent's Tale (10 page)

“Don’t I?” Fitchet was aggrieved. “Don’t I always keep it?” The shutters slammed.

“He does,” Sister Havis said. “Mostly.” Holding the lantern high, she stalked ahead of them through the snow.

Walt led the horses after her, the bishop, Oswald, and Aelwyn marching beside him, with Adelia and Mansur above them on the cart’s driving seat.

Rowley, aware now that he had tired her, would have left Adelia in the room that had been prepared for her and Gyltha and the baby in the guesthouse, but this dead young man was
her
responsibility. However good the reason, his body was being treated disgracefully at her behest; she must accord it what respect she could.

They were following the wall that ringed the convent’s extensive buildings and gardens to where it ran into the woods in which, on the other side, lay the dead man’s dead horse.

The rush of water that they’d heard from on the bridge became loud; they were close to the river, either the Thames itself or a fast stream running into it that gushed up even colder air. The noise became tremendous.

Mansur pointed; he and Adelia were seated high enough on the cart to see over the wall and, when trees allowed, across the water itself. There was their bridge and, on its far side, a water mill.

The Arab was saying something—she couldn’t hear him—perhaps that the mill had been in darkness when they’d stood on the bridge so that they hadn’t noticed it. Now light came through tiny windows set in its tower, and its great wheel was being turned by the race.

They’d pulled up. Sister Havis had stopped at a large stone hut built flush with the wall on this side and was unlocking its door.

The nun’s lantern showed the inside of the hut to be empty apart from a ladder and a few tools. The floor was slabbed with stone, but most of its space was taken up by a great curve of iron set with handles, like the lid of an immense pot.

Sister Havis stood back. “It will need two to lift it.” She had the same emotionless voice as her mother.

Aelwyn and Oswald exerted themselves to raise the lid, displaying the blackness of a hole and releasing a chill that was palpable even in the air of the hut, and with it a smell of straw and frozen meat.

The bishop had taken the lantern from the prioress and was down on his knees by the side of the hole. “Who built this?”

“We do not know, my lord. We discovered it and maintain it. Mother Abbess believes it was here long before our foundation.”

“The Romans, I wonder?” Rowley was intrigued. The ladder was carried over and put in place so that he could descend. His voice came up with an echo, still asking questions, Sister Havis answering them with detachment.

Yes, its position so far from the convent butchery was inconvenient, but presumably its builders had placed it here to be close to a part of the river that was embanked so that the chamber would suffer no erosion while yet benefiting from the cooling proximity of running water.

Yes, the convent still pickled and salted most of its animals after the Michaelmas slaughter, since even Godstow could not provide feed for them all during the winter, but freezing some carcasses enabled its people to have occasional fresh meat into the spring, or later.

Yes, of course, the mill pond over the way needed a very cold winter to turn to ice, but all winters were cold these days and the last freeze had been exceptional, providing them with sufficient frozen blocks to last until summer. Yes, his lordship would see a drain that took away any melted water.

“Marvelous.”

Adelia coughed with intent. Rowley’s head appeared. “What?”

“The obsequies, my lord.”

“Oh, of course.”

The body was lain on the slabs.

Rigor mortis had passed off, Adelia was interested to see, but that would be from the comparative warmth provided by the wrapping of straw and the shelter of the cart; down in that freezing hole, it would return.

The sure, strong voice of the Bishop of Saint Albans filled the hut. “
Domine, Iesu Christe, Rex gloriae
…Free the souls of all faithful departed from infernal punishment and the deep pit…nor let them fall into darkness, but may the sign-bearer Saint Michael lead them into the holy light which you promised…”

Adelia silently added her own requiem prayer:
And may those who love you forgive me for what we do.

She went down the pit ahead of the body, joining Oswald and the bishop. A dreadful place, like the inside of an enormous brick egg insulated throughout by thick, netted straw over which more netting held the ice blocks. On their hooks, butchered sides of beef, lamb, venison, and pig, whitened by frost, hung so close together that she could not pass through without brushing her shoulders against them.

She found a space and straightened, to have her cap caught in the talons of game birds hanging from their own gallows.

Teeth chattering—and not just from the cold—she and the others guided the feet of the dead man as Aelwyn and Walt lowered him.

Together they laid him down under the birds, positioning him so that if there were drips, they would not fall on his face.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” When the others had climbed out of the hole, she stayed by the dead man for a moment to make him a promise. “Whether we catch your killers or not, I will not leave you here for long.”

It was almost too long for her; she was so cold she couldn’t manage the ladder and Mansur had to hoist her out.

T
he abbess gave up her house to Rowley, saying it was a relief to do so; its steep steps to the front door had become difficult for her. In that he was her superior in God, she could do no less, although it gave him access to the inner courtyard with its cloister, chapel, refectory, and nuns’ dormitory, which were otherwise barred to men overnight. Having taken a look at Father Paton and deciding that he wasn’t a sexual threat, either, she put the secretary in with his master.

Jacques, Walt, Oswald, and Aelwyn were accommodated in the male servants’ quarters.

Mansur was given a pleasant room in the men’s guesthouse. Gyltha, Adelia, the baby, and the dog were accommodated just as pleasantly in the females’ wing next to the church. Angled outside steps led up to each guest’s private door, which, since they were on the top floor, gave the two women a view westward over the track to Oxford and the abbey’s fields where they sloped down to the Thames.

“Duck down,” said Gyltha, examining a large bed. “An’ no fleas.” She investigated further. “And some saint’s put hot bricks to warm it.”

Adelia wanted nothing so much as to lie down on it and sleep, and, for a while, all three of them did just that.

They were awakened by bells, one of them tolling as if in their ear and setting the water ewer shivering in its basin on the room’s table.

Ready to flee, Adelia picked up Allie where she lay between her and Gyltha. “Is it a fire?”

Gyltha listened. The massive strokes were coming from the church tower nearby, and with them came the chime of other bells, tinnier and much farther away. “It’s Sunday,” she said.

“Oh, to
hell.
It’s not, is it?”

However, courtesy and Adelia’s consciousness of their indebtedness to the abbess demanded that they attend the morning worship to which Godstow was summoning its people.

And more than just its own people. The church in the outer courtyard was open to everybody, lay and religious—though not, of course, to infidels and the smellier dogs, thus leaving Mansur and Ward still in their beds—and today everybody within walking range was struggling through snow to get to it. The village of Wolvercote came across the bridge en masse, since its own church had been allowed to fall into ruin by the lord of the manor.

The attraction was the bishop, of course; he was as miraculous as an angel descended. A view of his cope and miter alone was worth the tithes everybody had to pay; he might be able to cure the little un’s cough; for sure he could bless the winter sowing. Several poorly looking milch cows and one limping donkey were already tied up by the water trough outside, awaiting his attention.

The clergy entered by their own separate doorway to take their seats in the glorious stalls of the choir under the church’s equally glorious fan-vaulted roof.

By virtue of his tonsure, Father Paton sat next to the nuns’ chaplain, a little dormouse of a man, opposite the rows of nuns that included among their black ranks two young women in white veils who had a tendency to giggle; they found Father Paton funny.

Most bishops used their homilies to wag a finger at sin in general, often in Norman French, their mother tongue, or in Latin on the principle that the less the congregation understood, the more in awe it would be.

Rowley’s was different, and in an English his flock could understand. “There’s some buggers are saying poor Lady Rosamund has died at the Queen Eleanor’s hand, which it is a wickedness and a lie, and you’ll oblige our Lord by giving it no credit.”

He left the pulpit to stride up and down the church, lecturing, hectoring. He was here to discover what or who had caused Rosamund’s death, he said, “For I do know she was dearly loved in these parts. Maybe ’twas an accident, maybe ’twasn’t, but if it weren’t, both king and queen’ll see to it the villain be punished according to law. In the meantime, ’tis beholden on us all to keep our counsel and the precious peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Then he kneeled down on the stones and straw to pray, and everyone in church kneeled with him.

They love him,
Adelia thought.
As quickly as that, they love him. Is it showmanship? No, it isn’t. He’s beyond that now. Beyond me, too.

When they rose, however, one man—the miller from across the bridge, judging from the spectral whiteness with which flour had ingrained his skin—raised a question. “Master, they say as how the queen be upsides with the king. Ain’t going to be no trouble twixt ’em, is there?”

He was backed by a murmur of anxiety. The civil war in which a king had fought a queen was only a generation in the past; nobody here wanted to see another.

Rowley turned on him. “Which is your missus?”

“This un.” The man jerked a thumb at the comfortable lady standing beside him.

“And a good choice you made there, Master Miller, as all can see. But tell me you ain’t been upsides with her along the years some’eres, or her ain’t been upsides with you, but you diddun start a war over it. Reckon as royalty ain’t no different.”

Amid laughter, he returned to his throne.

One of the white-veiled girls sang the responsory in honor of the bishop’s presence and sang it so exquisitely that Adelia, usually deaf to music, waited impatiently through the congregation’s answers until she sang again.

So it was nice to find the same young woman waiting for her in the great courtyard outside after the clergy had filed out. “May I come and see the baby? I love babies.”

“Of course. I must congratulate you on your voice; it is a joy to hear.”

“Thank you. I am Emma Bloat.”

“Adelia Aguilar.”

They fell into step, or, rather, Adelia stepped and Emma bounced. She was fifteen years old and in a state of exaltation over something. Adelia hoped it was not the bishop. “Are you an oblate?”

“Oh, no. Little Priscilla is the one taking the veil.
I
am to be married.”

“Good.”

“It
is
, isn’t it? Earthly love…” Emma twirled in sheer joie de vivre. “God must reckon it as high as heavenly love, mustn’t he, despite what Sister Mold says, or why does He make us feel like this?” She thumped the region of her heart.

“‘It is better to marry than to burn,’” quoted Adelia.

“Huh. What I say is, how did Saint Paul know? He didn’t do either.”

She was a refreshing child and she did love babies, or she certainly loved Allie, with whom she was prepared to play peep-bo longer than Adelia had believed possible without the brain giving way.

It seemed that the girl must have privilege of some kind, since she was not called back to join the sisters’ afternoon routine.

Wealth or rank?
Adelia wondered.
Or both?

She showed no more curiosity about this influx of strangers to the convent than if they had been toys provided for her amusement, though she demanded that they be curious about her. “Ask me about my husband-to-be, ask me, ask me.”

He was beautiful, apparently,
oh
so beautiful, gallant, wild with love for her, a writer of romantic poems that rivaled any Paris might have sent to Helen.

Gyltha raised her eyebrows to Adelia, who raised her own. This was happiness indeed, and unusual to be found in an arranged marriage. For arranged it was; Emma’s father, she told them, was a wine merchant in Oxford and was supplying the convent with the best Rhenish to pay for having her educated as befitted a nobleman’s wife. It was he who had procured the match.

At this point, Emma, who was standing by the window, laughed so much that she had to hold on to the mullion.