The Serpent's Tale (19 page)

Yet Rowley had been right: This queen hadn’t murdered anybody.

There was no proof of it, of course. Nothing that would absolve her. The killing had been plotted at long range; people would say she had ordered it while she was still in France. There was nothing to scotch the rumor—apart from Eleanor’s own word.

But it wasn’t her style. Rowley had said so, and Adelia now agreed with him. If Eleanor had engineered it, she would have wanted to be present when it happened. This curiously naïve, horrible overseeing of her rival’s disintegration was to compensate her for not having been there to enjoy the last throes.

But damn it, I don’t have to witness it with you.
All at once, Adelia was overwhelmed by the obscenity of the situation. She was tired, and her hand stung like fire; she wanted her child. Allie would be missing her.

She stood up. “Lady, it is not healthy for you to be here. Let us go downstairs.”

The queen looked past her.

“Then I will,” Adelia said.

She walked to the door, skirting Montignard, who was snoring on the floor. Two spears clashed as they crossed, blocking the doorway in front of her; the first man-at-arms had been reinforced by another.

“Let me by,” she said.

“You want to piss, use a pot,” one of the men said, grinning.

Adelia returned to Eleanor. “I am not your subject, lady. My king is William of Sicily.”

The queen’s eyes remained on Rosamund.

Adelia gritted her teeth, fighting desperation.
This is not the way. If I’m to see Allie again, I must be calm, make this woman trust me.

After a while, followed by her dog, Adelia began circling the chamber, not looking for a way out—there was none—but using this trapped time to find out where Dakers had hidden herself.

It couldn’t have been under the bed or Ward would have sniffed her out; he didn’t have the finest nose in the world, it being somewhat overwhelmed by his own scent, but he wouldn’t have missed that.

Apart from the bed, the room contained a prie-dieu, smaller than the one in the bishop’s room at Saint Albans but as richly carved. Three enormous chests were stuffed with clothes.

A small table held a tray that had been brought in for the queen’s supper: a chicken, veal pie, a cheese, a loaf—somewhat mildewed—dried figs, a jug of ale, and a stoppered bottle of wine. Eleanor hadn’t touched it. Adelia, who’d last eaten at the nunnery, sliced heavily into the chicken and gave some to Ward. She drank the ale to satisfy her thirst and took a glass of wine with her to sip as she explored.

An aumbry contained pretty bottles and phials with labels:
Rose oyl. Swete violet. Rasberrie vinigar for to whiten teeth. Oyle of walnut to smooth the hands. Nearly all were similarly cosmetic, though Adelia noted that Rosamund had suffered from breathing problems—I’m not surprised, with your weight
—and had taken elecampane for it.

The bed took up more of the center of the room than was necessary by standing a foot or so out from the wall. Behind it was a tapestry depicting the Garden of Eden—obviously a favorite subject, because there was another, a better one, on the same theme on the easterly wall between two of the windows.

Going closer, so that she stood between the bed and the hanging, Adelia felt a blessed coolness.

The tapestry was old and heavy; the considerable draft emerging from underneath it did not cause it to shift. Where in the one on the other wall Adam and Eve sported in joyful movement, here cruder needlework stood them opposite each other amid unlikely trees, as frozen as poor Rosamund herself. The only depiction of liveliness was in the coiling green toils of the serpent—and even that was moth-eaten.

Adelia went closer; the chill increased.

There was a small gap in the canvas where the snake’s eye should have been—and it wasn’t the moth that had caused it. It had been deliberately made; there was buttonhole stitching round its edges.

A spy hole.

She had to exert some strength to push the hanging aside. Icy air came rushing out at her, and a stale smell. What she saw was a tiny room, corbeled into the tower’s wall. Rosamund hadn’t had to use chamber pots; hers was the luxury of a garderobe. Set into a curved bench of polished wood was a bottom-shaped, velvet-lined hole over a drop to the ground some hundred feet below. Soap in the shape of a rose lay in a holder next to a little golden ewer. A bowl within hand’s reach contained substantial wipes of lamb’s wool.

Good for Rosamund.
Adelia approved of garderobes, as long as the pit beneath them was dug out regularly; they saved maidservants having to go up and downstairs carrying, and often slopping, noisome containers.

She was not so enamored of the mural painted on the plastered walls; its eroticism being more suited to a bordello than to a privy, but perhaps Rosamund had enjoyed looking at it while she sat there, and undoubtedly Henry Plantagenet would have. Although, come to think of it, had even he been aware of the existence of the garderobe and its spy hole?

Adelia moved behind the tapestry so that she could apply her eye to the hole—and found that she could see right down the bed to the writing desk and the window beyond.

Here, then, was where Dakers had concealed herself and—unpleasant thought—had watched her, Adelia, at her investigations. What patience and what stamina to endure the cold; only fury inspired at seeing Eleanor snatch the crown off her mistress’s head had impelled her out of it.

But the careful stitching around the peephole indicated that tonight wasn’t the only time somebody had employed their time looking through it.

It would have been invited guests who’d ventured up to this floor—it was an English custom for the higher classes to entertain in their bedrooms. If Dakers had spied on them, she would have to have taken up position in the garderobe—with Rosamund’s permission and knowledge.

To watch the guests? The king? The bed and its activities?

Speculation opened an avenue that Adelia did not want to explore, still less the relationship between mistress and housekeeper.

To hell with the queen’s permission; she needed to breathe clean air. She slid herself out from under the hanging. Eleanor appeared not to have noticed. Adelia went to the nearest window, lifted the lattices’ catch, pulled it inward, and pushed the shutters open. Kicking a footstool into position, she stood on it and leaned out.

The bitter night sky crackled with stars. Peering downward to the ground, she saw scattered watch fires with armed men moving around them.

Oh, God, if they’re putting brushwood around the tower’s base…if a breeze comes up and blows a spark from one of the fires…

She and Eleanor were at the top of a chimney.

That was enough fresh air. Shivering, not merely from the cold, Adelia closed the shutters. In doing so, she put too much weight on one side of the footstool and returned to the floor in a noisy scramble.

Glancing at the queen, expecting a rebuke, she wondered if Eleanor was in a trance; the queen’s eyes had not shifted from Rosamund. From his position on the floor, Montignard kicked out, muttered, and then continued to snore.

Adelia bent down to replace the footstool and saw that its marquetry top had come adrift, revealing that it was, in fact, the lid of a box on legs. There were documents inside. She scooped them out and returned to her former place on the floor at the other side of the bed to read them.

Letters again, half a dozen or more, all of them addressed to Eleanor, all purporting to have been written by Rosamund, yet in the same hand as the one Adelia had put into her boot.

Each had the same jeering superscription and, in this light, she was able to read what followed; it was not always the same in every letter, but the inherent message was repeated over and over.

“Today did my lord king sport with me and tell me of his adoration…” “My lord king has this moment left my bed…” “He speaks of his divorce from you with longing…” “…the Pope will look kindly on divorce on the grounds of your treachery to my lord king in that you do inflame his sons against him.” “…the arrangements for my coronation at Winchester and Rouen.” “…my lord king will announce to the English who is their true queen.”

Poison in ink, drip, drip.

And the writer had penned them for Rosamund to duplicate in her own hand. He or she—more likely he—had even attached notes for her instruction.

“Be more legible, for the queen did scoff at your lettering and call you ignoramus.”

“Write quickly that this may reach the queen on her anniversary as she does set much store by that date and will be the more affected.”

“Hurry, for my messenger must come to Chinon, where the queen is kept, before the king moves her elsewhere.”

And most telling of all:
“We win, lady. You shall be queen before summer comes again.”

At no point did the instructor name himself. But, thought Adelia, he was someone who’d been near enough to Eleanor to know that she had ridiculed Rosamund’s writing.

And a fool. If his hope was to engineer a divorce between Henry and Eleanor and set Rosamund up as queen, he was lacking the most fundamental political sense. Henry would never divorce Eleanor. For one thing, even if wifely treason was grounds for divorce—and Adelia didn’t think it was—Henry had caused too much offense to the Church over the death of Becket and had suffered for it; he dare not offend again. For another, he had a regard for the order of things. Even more important to him was the fact that by losing Eleanor, he would lose her great Duchy of Aquitaine, and Henry, though a beast, was a beast that never gave up land.

In any case, the easygoing English might wink at their king’s mistress, but not a mistress imposed on them as queen; it would be an insult.

I
know that, and I’m a foreigner.

And yet these letters had been good enough to inspire a stupid, ambitious woman to copy and send them, good enough to inflame a queen into escaping and urging war by her sons against their father.

Rowley could be right; the person who had written these things had done so to create war.

There was a loud sniff from the other side of the room. Eleanor spoke in triumph. “She is going. She has begun to stink.”

That was quicker than expected. Surprised, Adelia looked up to where Rosamund was still stiffly inclined over her work.

She looked round further and saw that, in search of comfort, Ward had settled himself on the trailing end of the queen’s ermine cloak. “I’m afraid that’s merely my dog,” she said.

“
Merely?
Get him off. What does he do here?”

One of the men-at-arms who’d been nodding in the doorway roused himself and came in to deposit Ward on the landing outside, then, at a nod from his queen, returned to his post.

Eleanor shifted; she’d become restive. “Saint Eulalie grant me patience. How long will this take?” The vigil was becoming tiresome.

Adelia nearly said, “A while yet,” and then didn’t. Until she knew more about the situation, she had better stay in the role of a woman whom the queen accepted as a somewhat soiled part of Rowley’s baggage train but who’d nevertheless been chosen by God to save the royal life and was being kept close to the royal side as a reward.

But you
should
know more about me,
Adelia thought, irritated.
I am dying with curiosity; so should you be. You should know more about everything: how Rosamund died, why she wrote the letters, who dictated them…you should have had the room searched and found these exemplars before I did. It’s not enough to be a queen; you should ask questions. Your husband does.

Henry Plantagenet was a ferret and an employer of ferrets. He’d nosed out Adelia’s profession in a second and penned her up in England, like one of the rarer animals in his menagerie, until he found a use for her. He knew exactly how things stood between her and his bishop; he’d known when their baby was born—and its sex, which was more than the child’s father had known. A few days afterward, to prove that he knew, a royal messenger in plain clothes had delivered a gloriously lacy christening gown to Adelia’s fenland door with a note: “Call her what you will, she shall always be Rowley-Powley to me.”

Compared to the king, Eleanor walked within a circle of vision encompassing only her personal welfare and the certainty that God was most closely concerned with it. The questions she’d asked in this chamber had related solely to herself.

Adelia wondered whether she should enlighten her. Rowley and the queen must have corresponded in the past; she would know his writing. Showing her these documents would at least prove that he hadn’t written them for Rosamund to copy. She might even recognize the penmanship and know who had.

Wait, though. There were two crimes here.

If Mansur or her foster father had been watching Adelia at that moment, they would have seen her adopt what they called her “dissecting face,” the mouth tightened into a line, eyes furious with concentration, as they always were when her knife followed the link of muscle to sinew, pursued a vein, probed, and cut effect in order to find cause.