The Serpent's Tale (15 page)

More silence. In the dying light, crows flapped joyously over the elm tops, their calls mocking the earthbound idiots below.

“Forgive me,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said politely. “Do I understand that if we’d followed the right-hand hedge, we could have eventually reached the destination we wanted in the first bloody place?”

“Yes.”

“The right-hand hedge?” the bishop persisted.

“Well…obviously, to go back it would be on the left-hand again….
Are
you taking us back in?”

“Yes,” the bishop said.

Lord, Lord, he’s taking us back in. We’ll be here all night. I wonder if Allie’s all right.

They rang the great bell again, in case the figure they’d seen on the tower’s walkway had relented, but, by the time they’d watered the horses at the trough, it was obvious that he or she had not.

Nobody spoke as loins were girded and a lantern lit. It was going to be very dark in there.

Rowley swept his cap off his head and knelt. “Be with us, Lord, for the sake of Thy dear Son.”

Thus, the four reentered the maze. Knowing that it had an end made their minds easier, though the cost of constantly twisting and turning and backing out of the blind alleys was higher now that they were tiring.

“How’d you learn of mazes, mistress?” Walt wanted to know.

“My foster father. He’s traveled extensively in the East, where he saw some, though not as big.”

“Proper old Wyrm, this, i’n it? Reckon there’s a way through as we’m not seeing.”

Adelia agreed with him. To be girded to this extent from the outside world would be an intolerable inconvenience; there had to be a straighter route. She suspected that some of the blind ends that appeared to be stone and hedge walls were not lined by masonry at all; they were gates with blackthorn trained over them that could open and shut on a direct path.

No good to her and the others, though. Investigating each one to see if it were movable would take too long and would result only in having to make further choices of tunnels that ended in fixtures.

They were condemned to the long way through.

They made it in silence. Even Walt stopped talking.

Nighttime brought the maze to life. The long-dead trickster who had designed it still tried to frighten them, but they knew him now. Nevertheless, the place had its own means of instilling dread; lantern light lit a thick tube of laced branches as if the men and the woman in it were struggling through an interminable gray stocking infested by creatures that, unseen, rustled out their dry existence in its web.

By the time they emerged, it was too dark to see whether the cleft they stepped through was ornamented like the entrance. They’d lost interest, anyway; amusement had left them.

The tunnels had to some extent protected them from the bitter air that assailed them now. Apart from an owl that, disturbed by their coming, took off from a wall with a slow clap of wings, there was no sound from the tower that faced them across the bailey. It was more massive than it had appeared from a distance, rising sheer and high toward a sky where stars twinkled icily down on it like scattered diamonds.

Jacques produced another lantern and fresh candles from his saddlebag and led them toward a blacker shape in the shadows at the tower’s base that indicated the steps to a door.

Nobody had crossed the bailey since the snow fell; nothing human, anyway—there were animal and bird prints aplenty. But the place was an obstacle course. Snowy bumps proved to be abandoned goods: a broken chair, pieces of cloth, a barrel with its staves crushed on one side, battered pans, a ladle. The snow covered a scene of chaos.

Walt, stumbling, revealed a bucket with a dead hen inside. The corpse of a dog, frozen in the act of snarling, lay at the end of its chain.

Rowley gave the bucket a kick that dislodged the hen’s carcass. “The disloyal, thieving
bastards.
”

Was that what this was?

It had been said that when William the Norman died, his servants immediately stripped their king’s body and ran off with such of his possessions as they could carry, leaving his knights to find the great and terrible Conqueror’s corpse naked on the floor of an empty palace room.

Had Rosamund’s servants done the same the moment their mistress was dead? Rowley called it disloyalty, but Adelia remembered what she’d thought of Rosamund’s neglect of Bertha; loyalty could come only of exchange and mutual regard.

The door to the tower, when the four reached it, was of thick, black oak at the top of a flight of wickedly glistening steps. There was no knocker. They hammered on it but neither dead nor living answered them. The sound echoed as if into an empty cave.

Keeping together—nobody suggested separating—they filed around the tower’s base, through arched entrances to courtyards, to where another door proved as immovable as the first. It was, at least, on ground level.

“We’ll ram the swine.”

First, though, the horses had to be cared for. A path led to a deserted stable yard containing a well that responded with the sound of a splash when Walt dropped a stone down it, allaying his fear that its depths would prove frozen. The stalls had straw in them, if somewhat dirty, and their mangers had been replenished with oats not long before their former occupants had been stolen.

“Reckon as it’ll do for now,” Walt said grudgingly.

The others left him chipping ice from the well’s windlass.

The pillagers had been arbitrary and hurried. An otherwise deserted byre held a cow that had resisted theft by being in the act of delivering its calf. Both were dead, the calf still in its birth sac.

Dodging under a washing line on which hung sheets as stiff as metal, they explored the kitchen buildings. The scullery had been stripped of its sink, the kitchen of everything except a massive table too heavy to lift.

Trying the barn, they found indentations in its earth floor to show where a plow and harrow had once stood. And…

“What’s this, my lord?”

Jacques was holding up his lantern to a large contraption in a corner by a woodpile.

It was metal. A flanged footplate formed the base of two upright struts attached to it by heavy springs. Both sets of struts ended in a row of triangular iron teeth, shaped to fit into the corresponding row of the other’s.

The men paused.

Walt rejoined them, to stare. “Seen ’em as’ll take your leg,” he said slowly. “Never like this un, though.”

“Neither have I,” Rowley told him. “God be merciful, somebody’s actually oiled it.”

“What is it?” Adelia asked.

Without answering, Rowley went up to the contraption and grasped one set of its teeth. Walt took the other and, between them, they pulled the two sets of struts’ rows apart until each lay flat on the ground opposite the other, teeth gaping upward. “All right, Walt. Careful now.” Rowley bent and, keeping his body well away, extended an arm to fumble underneath the mechanism. “Works by a trigger,” he said. Walt nodded.

“What
is
it?” Adelia asked again.

Rowley stood up and picked up a log from the woodpile. He gestured for Adelia to keep her dog away. “Imagine it lying in long grass. Or under snow.”

Almost flat, as the thing was now, it would be undetectable.

It’s a mantrap. Oh, God help us.

She bent and grasped Ward’s collar.

Rowley chucked the log onto the contraption’s metal plate.

The thing leaped upward like a snapping shark. The teeth met. The clang seemed to come later.

After a moment, Walt said, “Get you round the whatsis, that would, begging your pardon, mistress. No point in gettin’ you out, either.”

“The lady didn’t care for poachers, it seems,” the bishop said. “Damned if I go wandering her woods.” He dusted his hands. “Come on, now. This won’t beat the Bulgars, as my old granddad used to say. We need a ram.”

Adelia stayed where she was, staring at the mantrap. At two and a half feet high, the teeth would engage around the average man’s groin, spiking him through. As Walt had said, releasing the victim would make no difference to an agonizing and prolonged death.

The thing was still vibrating, as if it were licking its chops.

The bishop had to come back for her.

“Somebody made it,” she said. “Somebody oiled it. For use.”

“I know. Come along, now.”

“This is an awful place, Rowley.”

“I know.”

Jacques found a sawing horse in one of the outhouses. Holding it sideways by its legs and running with it, he and Walt managed to break down the tower’s back door at the third attempt.

It was nearly as cold inside as out. And more silent.

They were in a round hall that, because of the tower’s greater base, was larger than any room they were likely to find upstairs. Not a place for valued visitors to wait; it was more a guardroom. A couple of beautiful watchman’s chairs, too heavy to be looted, were its saving grace. For the rest, hard benches and empty weapon racks made up the furniture. Cressets had been torn from the walls, a chandelier from its chain.

Some tapers clipped into their holders were strewn among the rushes of the floor. Lighting them from the lantern, Rowley, Adelia, and Walt took one each and began the ascent of the bare staircase running upward around the wall.

They found the tower to be one circular room placed on another, like a tube of apothecary’s pills wrapped in stiff paper and set upright, the door to each reached by a curving flight and a tiny landing. The second they came to was as utilitarian as the first, its empty racks, some dropped strands of polishing horsetail, and the smell of beeswax suggesting an overlarge cleaning cupboard.

Above that, the maids’ room: four wooden beds and little else. All the beds were stripped of palliasse and covering.

Each room was deserted. Each was marginally less uncomfortable than the one below. A sewing room—looted, for the most part, but the bench tables set under each arrow slit to catch the light carried torn strips of material and an errant pincushion. A plaster dummy had been smashed to the floor, and shards of it were seemingly kicked onto the landing.

“They hated her,” said Adelia, peering in through the arched doorway.

“Who?”

“The servants.”

“Hated who?” The bishop was beginning to puff.

“Rosamund,” Adelia told him. “Or Dame Dakers.”

“With these stairs? I don’t blame ’em.”

She grinned at his laboring back. “You’ve been eating too many episcopal dinners.”

“As you say, mistress.” He was unoffended. It was a rebuff; in the old days, he’d have been indignant.

I must remember
, she thought.
We are no longer intimate; we keep our distance.

The fourth room—or was it the fifth?—had not been looted, though it was starker than any. A truckle bed, its gray, knitted bedspread rigidly tucked in. A deal table on which stood ewer and basin. A stool. A plain chest with a few bits of women’s clothing, equally plain and neatly folded.

“Dakers’s room,” Adelia said. She was beginning to get the feel of the housekeeper, and was daunted by it.

“Nobody’s here. Leave it.”

But Adelia was interested. Here, the looters had desisted. Here, she was sure, Dragon Dakers had stood on the stairs, as frightening as Bertha described her, and stopped them from going farther.

Rosamund’s escutcheon was carved into the eastern section of the west wall above Dakers’s bed; it had been painted and gilded so that it dominated the gray room. Raising her candle to look at it, Adelia heard an intake of breath from Rowley in the doorway that wasn’t due to exertion.

“God’s teeth,” he said, “that’s madness.”

A carved outer shield showed three leopards and the fleur-de-lis, which every man and woman in England now recognized as the arms of their Angevin Plantagenet king. Inside it was a smaller shield, checkered, with one quarter containing a serpent, the other a rose.

Even Adelia’s scanty knowledge of heraldry was enough to know that she was looking at the escutcheon of a man and his wife.

The bishop, staring, joined her. “
Henry.
In the name of God, Henry, what were you
doing
to allow this? It’s madness.”

A motto had been carved into the wall beneath the escutcheon. Like most armorial mottos, it was a pun.
Rosa Mundi.

Rose of all the world.

“Oh, dear,” Adelia said.

“Jesus have mercy,” Rowley breathed. “If the queen saw this…”

Together, motto and escutcheon made the taunt of all taunts:
He prefers me to you. I am his wife in all but name, the true queen of his heart.

The bishop’s mind was leaping ahead. “Damnation. Whether Eleanor’s seen it or not is irrelevant. It’s enough for others to assume that she knows of it and had Rosamund killed because of it. It’s a reason to kill. It’s flaunting usurpation.”