The Serpent's Tale (21 page)

Its door faced the wind, Adelia told herself. The wind carried snow and extinguished the flames.

But what couldn’t be extinguished was the image of Rosamund, diabolically preserved, waiting in that cold upper chamber for her servant to return to her….

It was a sad little flotilla at the river: rowing boats, punts, an old wherry, all found moored along the banks and commandeered by Schwyz’s soldiers. The only vessel of any substance was the barge that Mansur and Oswald and the Godstow men had brought upriver to collect Rosamund’s body. Adelia looked for Mansur and, when she didn’t see him, became frightened that the soldiers had killed him. These were crude men; they reminded her of the followers of Crusade armies passing through Salerno who’d been prepared to slaughter anybody with an appearance different from their own. There
was
a tall figure standing in the barge’s prow, but the man was cloaked and hooded like everybody else and the snow hindered identification. It could be Mansur, it could be a soldier.

She tried reassuring herself with the fact that Schwyz and his men were mercenaries and more interested in utility than the slaughter of Saracens; they would surely see the need to keep alive every skilled boatman they had to take them to Oxford.

The chaos that had reigned in Wormhold’s bailey was now redoubled as Eleanor’s people fought to accompany their queen on the Godstow barge—the only one with a cabin. If there was someone managing the embarkation, he was overwhelmed.

The mercenary Cross, in charge of Adelia and Dakers, waited too long for orders; by the time he realized there weren’t going to be any, the barge was dangerously overladen with the queen’s servants and baggage. He and the two women were waved away from it.

Cursing, he hauled them both along to the next vessel in line and almost threw them into its stern. Ward made a leap and joined them.

It was a rowing boat. An
open
rowing boat tied by a hawser onto the stern of the Godstow barge. Adelia shrieked at the soldier, “You can’t put us here. We’ll freeze.” Exposed to the lacerating wind in this thing, they’d be dead long before they reached Oxford, two corpses as rigid as Rosamund’s.

The boat shuddered as three more people were forced into it by another guard, who clambered in after them. A voice deeper than Adelia’s and more used to carrying overrode the wind: “In the name of God, man, do you want to kill us? Get us under cover. Ask the queen, that lady there saved her life.” The Bishop of Saint Albans had joined her, and her protest. Still roped to Jacques and Walt and at a spear’s end, he nevertheless carried authority.

“I’m getting it, aren’t I?” Cross shouted back. “Shut your squalling. Sit there. In front of the women.”

Once everybody was settled to his satisfaction, he produced a large bundle that turned out to be an old sail and called to his companion, addressing him as Giorgio, to help him spread it.

Whatever their manners, he and his companion were efficient. The wind tried to whip the canvas away from them, but Dakers and Adelia were made to sit on one end of it before it was looped back and up, bringing it forward so that it covered them as well as the three prisoners and, finally, the two soldiers themselves, who took their seat in the prow. Their efforts had been self-preservation; they were coming, too. With deliberate significance, Giorgio placed a stabbing sword across his knees.

The sail was dirty and smelly, and rested heavily on the top of everybody’s head, not quite wide enough for its purpose, so that covering themselves fully against the slanting wind on one side left a gap on the other. Ice formed over it immediately, rendering it stiff but also making a protective layer. It was shelter of a sort.

The river was being whipped into a fury that slopped wavelets of icy water over the gunwales. Adelia heaved Ward onto her lap, covered him with her cloak, and put her feet up against Rowley’s back to keep them out of the wet—he was on the thwart immediately in front of her on the starboard side where the gap was. Jacques sat between him and Walt.

“Are you all right?” She had to shout against the shriek of the wind.

“Are you?” he asked.

“Splendid.”

The messenger was also trying to be brave. Adelia heard him say, “Boat trip—makes a nice change.”

“It’ll come out of your wages,” the bishop told him. Walt grunted.

There was no time for more. The two soldiers were yelling at them to bail “before this bloody scow goes under,” and were handing out receptacles with which to do it. The three prisoners were given proper bailers while two jugs were passed to the women. “And put your bloody backs to it.”

Adelia began bailing—if the boat sank beneath them, they’d be dead before they could scramble to the bank. As fast as she could, she chucked icy water out into the river. The river chucked it back.

Seen through the gap in the sail, the scudding snow was vaguely illuminated by the lamp on the stern of the barge ahead and the prow of whatever vessel was behind them, providing just enough light for Adelia to recognize the pitifully inadequate jug with which she was bailing. It was of silver and had lately stood on the tray on which a servant had brought food and drink to Eleanor in Rosamund’s chamber. The Aquitanians had been right; the mercenaries—the two in this boat, at any rate—were thieves.

Adelia experienced a sudden fury that centered on the stolen jug but had more to do with being cold, tired, wet, in extreme discomfort, and frightened for her life. She turned on Dakers, who was doing nothing. “Bail, blast you.”

The woman remained motionless, her head lolling.
Probably dead
, Adelia thought.

Anger had afflicted Rowley as well. He was shouting at his captor to free their hands so he and Jacques and Walt could bail faster—they were being slowed by having to scoop the water up and out in awkward unison.

He was again told to shut his squalling, but after a minute Adelia felt the boat rock even more heavily and then heard the three men in front of her swearing. She gathered from their abuse that they’d been cut free of one another but the separate pieces of rope that bound each pair of wrists were still in place.

Still, the three could now bail quicker—and did. Adelia transferred her fury to Dakers for dying after all she, Adelia Aguilar, had done for her. “Sheer ingratitude,” she snapped, and grabbed the woman’s wrist. For the second time that night, she felt a weak pulse.

Leaning forward so that she nearly squashed the dog on her lap, she jerked Dakers’s feet out of the bilge and, to warm them, pushed one between the bodies of Rowley and Jacques and the other between Jacques and Walt.

“How long are we going to sit here?” she screamed over their heads at the soldiers. “God’s rib, when are we going to
move
?”

But the wind screamed louder than she could; the men didn’t hear her. Rowley, though, nodded his head in the direction of the gap.

She peered out at the whirling curtain of snow. They
were
moving, had been moving for some time, and had reached a bend in the river where a high bank of trees must have been sheltering them a little.

Whether the barge in front, to which they were attached, was being poled by men or pulled by a horse, she didn’t know—a dreadful task for either. It was probably being poled; they seemed to be going faster than walking pace. The wind at their backs and the flow of the river was helping them along, sometimes too much—the prow of their boat bumped into the stern of the barge, and the soldiers were having to take turns to struggle out from under the sail cover to fend off with an oar.

How far Oxford was she didn’t know, either, but at this rate of progress, Godstow could only be an hour or so away—and there, somehow, she must get ashore.

With this determined, Adelia felt calmer, a doctor again—and one with an ailing patient on her hands. Part of her extreme irritation had been because she was hungry. It came to her that Dakers was probably even hungrier than she was, faint from it—there’d been no sign of food in the Wormhold kitchen when they’d investigated it.

Adelia, though she might condemn the thieving mercenaries, hadn’t come empty-handed out of Rosamund’s chamber, either; there’d been food left on the queen’s tray, and hard times had taught her the value of foraging.

Well, Rosamund wasn’t going to eat it.

She delved into her pocket and brought out a lumpy napkin, unfolded it, broke off a large piece from the remains of Eleanor’s veal pie, and waved it under Dakers’s nose. The smell of it acted as a restorative; it was snatched from her fingers.

Making sure the soldiers couldn’t see her—she could barely see them in the darkness under the sail—she leaned forward again and slid the cheese she’d also filched between Jacques and Rowley until she felt the roped hand of one of them investigate it, grasp it, and squeeze her own hand in acknowledgment. There came a pause in the three men’s bailing, during which, she guessed, the cheese was being secretly portioned, causing the soldiers to shout at them again.

The remains of the veal pie she divided between herself and Ward.

After that there was little to be done but endure and bail. Every so often, the sail drooped so heavily between them that one of the men had to punch it from underneath in order to rid it of the snow weighting it.

The level of water slopping below her raised legs refused to go down, however much she threw over the side; each breath she expelled wetted the cloak muffling her mouth, freezing immediately so that her lips became raw. The sailcloth scraped against her head as she bent and came up again. But if she stopped, the cold would congeal the blood in her veins. Keep on bailing, stay alive, live to see Allie again.

Rowley’s elbow jerked into her knees. She went on bailing, lean, dip, toss, lean, dip, toss; she’d been doing it forever, would continue forever. Rowley had to nudge her again before she realized she could stop. There was no water coming in.

The wind had lessened. They were in a muffled silence, and light of a sort—was it day?—came through the window of the sail’s gap, beyond which snow was falling so thickly it confused the eye into giving the impression that the boat was progressing through air filled with swansdown.

The cold also coming in through the gap had numbed her right side and shoulder. She leaned forward and pressed against Rowley’s back to preserve some warmth for the two of them, pulling Dakers with her so that the housekeeper’s body was against Jacques’s.

Rowley turned his head slightly, and she felt his breath on her forehead. “Well?”

Adelia shifted higher to peer over his shoulder. Despite the fall in the wind, the swollen river was running faster than ever and putting the rowing boat in danger of crashing into the barge or veering against a bank.

One of the soldiers—she thought it was Cross, the younger of the two—was fending off, having abandoned the shelter of the sail so that it drooped over his companion, who was hunched over the prow thwart, exhausted or asleep, or both.

There was no movement, either, from Walt or Jacques. Dakers was still slumped against Jacques’s back.

Adelia nosed Rowley’s hood away from his ear and put her lips against it: “They’re going to raise Eleanor’s standard at Oxford. They think the Midlands will rise up and join her rebellion.”

“How many men? At Oxford, how many men?”

“A thousand, I think.”

“Did I see Eynsham back there?”

“Yes. Who is he?”

“Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope. Don’t trust him.”

“Schwyz?” she asked.

“Bastard mercenary. First-class soldier.”

“Somebody called Wolvercote is in charge of the army at Oxford.”

“A bastard.”

That disposed of the main players, then. She rested her face against his cheek in momentary contentment.

“Got your knife?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Cut this bloody rope.” He jiggled his bound hands.

She took another look at the soldier crouching the prow; his eyes were closed.

“Come on.” Rowley’s mouth barely moved. “I’ll be getting off in a minute.” They might have been journeying luxuriously together and he’d remembered a prior destination to hers.

“No.” She put her arms round him.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ve
got
to find Henry. Warn him.”

“No.” In this blizzard, nobody would find anybody. He’d die. The fen people told tales about this sort of snowstorm, of unwary cottagers, having ventured out in it to lock up their poultry or bring in the cow, unable find their way back through a freezing, whirling thickness that took away sight and sense of direction so that they ended up stiff and dead only yards from their own front doors. “No,” she said again.

“Cut this bloody rope.”

The soldier in the prow stirred and muttered. “What you doing?”

They waited until he settled again.

“Do you want me to go with my hands tied?” Rowley breathed.

Christ
God,
how she loathed him. And loathed Henry Plantagenet. The king, always the king if it costs my life, yours, our child’s, all happiness.

She delved into her pocket, gripped the knife, and seriously considered sticking it into his leg. He couldn’t then go wandering about in a circle and end up as a mound of ice in some field.