The Serpent's Tale (27 page)

“I don’t know.” She realized she had been saying “I” all this time. “I shall consult with the Lord Mansur. He will investigate.”

The slightest flicker of amusement crossed the prioress’s face; she knew who the investigator was. “Pray do,” she said.

From the cloister ahead of them came the sound of laughter and singing. It had, Adelia realized, been going on for some time. Music, happiness, still existed, then.

Automatically, the prioress began walking toward it. Adelia went with her.

A couple of the younger nuns were screaming joyously in the garth as they dodged snowballs being pelted at them by a scarlet-clad youth. Another young man was strumming a viol and singing, his head upraised to an upper window of the abbess’s house, at which Eleanor stood laughing at the antics.

This, in the sanctum. Where no layman should set foot. Probably never had until now.

From Eleanor’s window came a trail of perfume, elusive as a mirage, shimmering with sensuality, a siren scent beckoning toward palm-fringed islands, a smell so lovely that Adelia’s nose, even while it analyzed—bergamot, sandalwood, roses—sought longingly after its luxury before the icy air took it away from her.

Oh, Lord, I am so tired of death and cold.

Sister Havis stood beside her, rigid with disapproval, saying nothing. But in a minute the players saw her. The scene froze instantly; the troubadour’s song stopped in his throat, snow dropped harmlessly from the hand of his companion, and the young nuns assumed attitudes of outraged piety and continued their walk as if they had never broken stride. The snowballer swept his hat from his head and held it to his chest in parodied remorse.

Eleanor waved from her window. “Sorry,” she called, and closed the shutters.

So I am not the only taint,
Adelia thought, amused. The queen and her people were bringing the rich colors of worldliness into the convent’s black-and-white domain; the presence of Eleanor, which had undermined an entire Crusade, threatened Godstow’s foundations as even Wolvercote and his mercenaries did not.

Then the amusement went.
Did she bring a killer with her?

A
delia was too tired to do much for the rest of the morning except look after Allie while Gyltha went off to meet friends in the kitchen. It was where she picked up a good deal of information and gossip.

On her return, she said, “They’re busy cooking for young Emma’s wedding now that Old Wolfie’s turned up. Poor soul, I wouldn’t fancy marryin’ that viper. They’re wondering if she’s having second thoughts—she’s keeping to the cloister and ain’t spoke a word to him, so they say.”

“It’s bad luck to see your bridegroom before the wedding,” Adelia said vaguely.

“I wouldn’t want to see
him
after,” Gyltha said. “Oh, and later on the sisters is going to see about them hangin’ off the bridge. Abbess says it’s time they was buried.” She took off her cloak. “Should be interestin’. Old Wolfie, he’ll be the sort as likes corpses decoratin’ the place.” There was gleam in her eye. “Maybe as there’ll be a battle atwixt ’em. Oh, Lord, where you going
now
?”

“The infirmary.” Adelia had remembered her patient.

Sister Jennet greeted her warmly. “Perhaps you can convey my gratitude to the Lord Mansur. Such a neat, clean stump, and the patient is progressing well.” She looked wistful. “How I should have liked to witness the operation.”

It was the instinct of a doctor, and Adelia thought of the women lost to her own profession, as this one was, and thanked her god for the privilege that had been Salerno.

She was escorted down the ward. All the patients were men—“women mainly treat themselves”—most of them suffering from congestion of the lungs caused, the infirmaress said, by living on low-lying ground subject to unhealthy vapors from the river.

Three were elderly, from Wolvercote. “These are malnourished,” the infirmaress said of them, not bothering to lower her voice. “Lord Wolvercote neglects his villagers shamefully; they haven’t so much as a church to pray in, not since it fell down. It is God’s grace to them that we are nearby.”

She passed on to another bed where a nun was applying warm water to a patient’s ear. “Frostnip,” she said.

With a pang of guilt, Adelia recognized Oswald, Rowley’s man-at-arms. She’d forgotten him, yet he had been one of those, along with Mansur, poling the barge that the convent had sent to Wormhold.

Walt was sitting at his bedside. He knuckled his forehead as Adelia came up.

“I’m sorry,” she told Oswald. “Is it bad?”

It looked bad. Dark blisters had formed on the outer curve of the ear so that the man appeared to have a fungus attached to his head. He glowered at her.

“Shoulda kept his hood pulled down,” Walt said, cheerfully. “We did, didn’t we, mistress?” The mutual suffering on the boat had become a bond.

Adelia smiled at him. “We were fortunate.”

“We’re keeping an eye on the ear,” Sister Jennet said, equally cheerful. “As I tell him, it will either stay on or fall off. Come along.”

There were still screens round young Poyns’s bed—not so much, Sister Jennet explained, to provide privacy for him as to prevent his evil mercenary ways from infecting the rest of the ward.

“Though I must say he has not uttered a single oath since he’s been here, which is unusual in a Fleming.” She pulled the screen aside, still talking. “I can’t say the same for his friend.” She shook a finger at Cross, who, like Walt, was visiting.

“We ain’t bloody Flemings,” Cross said wearily.

Adelia was not allowed to look at the wound. Dr. Mansur, apparently, had already done so and declared himself satisfied.

The stump was well bandaged and—Adelia sniffed it—had no smell of corruption. Mansur, having attended so many operations with her, would have been able to tell if there was any sign of mortification.

Poyns himself was pale but without fever and taking food. For a moment, Adelia allowed herself to glory in him, orgulous as a peacock at her achievement, even while she marveled at the hardihood of the human frame.

She inquired after Dame Dakers; here was another she had neglected, and for whom she felt a responsibility.

“We keep her in the warming room,” Sister Jennet said, as of an exhibit. “Once she was recovered, I couldn’t let her stay here—she frightened my patients.”

I
n a monastery, the warming room would have been the scriptorium where such monks as had the skill spent their days copying manuscripts while carefully guarded braziers saved their poor fingers from cramping with cold.

Here were only Sister Lancelyne and Father Paton—he came as a surprise; Adelia had forgotten the existence of Rowley’s secretary. Both were writing, though not books.

Thin winter sun shone on their bent heads and on the documents with large seals attached to them by ribbon covering the table at which they sat.

Adelia introduced herself. Father Paton screwed up his eyes and then nodded; he’d forgotten her also.

Sister Lancelyne was delighted to make her acquaintance. She was the sort of person to whom gossip was without interest unless it was literary. Nor did she seem to know that Rowley was lost. “Of course, you came with the bishop’s party, did you not? Please extend to his lordship my gratitude for Father Paton;
what
I would do without this gentleman…I had vowed to arrange our cartulary and register in some sort of order, a task that proved beyond me until his lordship sent this Hercules into my Augean stables.”

Father Paton as Hercules was something to savor; so was Sister Lancelyne herself, an old, small, gnomelike woman with the bright, jewellike eyes of a toad; so was the room, shelved from floor to ceiling, each shelf stacked with rolls of deeds and charters showing their untidy, sealed ends.

“Alphabetical order, you see,” chanted Sister Lancelyne. “That is what we have to achieve, and a calendar showing which tithe is due to us on what day, what rent…but I see you are looking at our book.”

It was the
only
book, a slim volume bound in calfskin; it had a small shelf to itself that had been lined with velvet like a jewel box. “We have a Testament, of course,” Sister Lancelyne said, apologizing for the lack of library, “and a breviary, both are in the chapel, but…oh, dear.” For Adelia had advanced on the book. As she took its spine between finger and thumb to remove it, there was a gasp of relief from the nun. “I see you care for books; so many drag at its top with a forefinger and break…”

“Boethius,” Adelia said with pleasure.
“‘O happy race of men if love that rules the stars may also rule your hearts.’”

“‘To acquire divinity, become gods,’”
exulted Sister Lancelyne. “‘
Omnis igitur beatus deus…by participation.’
They imprisoned him for it.”

“And killed him. I know, but as my foster father says, if he hadn’t been in prison, he would never have written
The Consolation of Philosophy.
”

“We only have the
Fides and Ratio
,” said Sister Lancelyne. “I long for…no, mea culpa, I
covet
the rest as King David lusted on Bathsheba. They have an entire
Consolation
in the library at Eynsham, and I ventured to beg the abbot if I might borrow it to copy, but he wrote back to say it was too precious to send. He does not credit women with scholarship and, of course, you can’t blame him.”

Adelia was not a scholar herself—too much of her reading had largely and necessarily been expended on medical treatises—but she possessed a high regard for those who were; the talk of her foster father and her tutor, Gordinus, had opened a door to the literature of the mind so that she’d glimpsed a shining path to the stars, which, she promised herself, she would investigate one day. In the meantime, it was nice to discover it here among shelves and the smell of vellum and this little old woman’s unextinguished desire for knowledge.

Carefully, she replaced the book. “I was hoping to find Dame Dakers with you.”

“Another great help,” Sister Lancelyne said happily, pointing to a hooded figure squatting on the floor, half-hidden by the shelves.

They’d given Rosamund’s housekeeper a knife with which to sharpen their quills. Goose feathers lay beside her, and she held one in her hand, the shreds of its calamus scattered on her lap. A harmless occupation, and one she must have engaged in a hundred times for Rosamund, yet Adelia was irresistibly reminded of something being dismembered.

She went to squat beside the woman. The two scribes had gone back to their work. “Do you remember me, mistress?”

“I remember you.” Dakers went on shaving the quill end, making quick movements with the knife.

She had been fed and rested; she looked less bleached, but no amount of well-being was ever going to plump the skin over Dakers’s skeleton, nor was it going to distract her hatred. The eyes bent on her work still glowed with it. “Found my darling’s killer yet?” she asked.

“Not yet. Did you hear of Bertha’s death?”

Dakers’s mouth stretched, showing her teeth. She had—and happily. “I summoned my master to punish her, and he’s a’done it.”

“What master?”

Dakers turned her head so that Adelia stared full into her face; it was like looking into a charnel pit. “There is only The One.”

C
ross was waiting for her outside, and loped truculently alongside as she walked. “Here,” he said, “what they goin’ to do with Giorgio?”

“Who? Oh, Giorgio. Well, I suppose the sisters will bury him.” The corpses were piling up at Godstow.

“Where, though? I want him planted proper. He was a Christian, was Giorgio.”

And a mercenary
, thought Adelia, which might, in Godstow’s eyes, put him in the same category as others who’d relinquished their right to a Christian grave. She said, “Have you asked the nuns?”

“Can’t talk to ’em.” Cross found the holy sisters intimidating. “
You
ask ’em.”

“Why should I?” The sheer gracelessness of this little man…

“You’re a Sicilian, ain’t you? Like Giorgio. You said you was, so you got to see him planted proper, with a priest and the blessing of…what was that saint had her tits cut off?”

“I suppose you mean Saint Agnes,” Adelia said coldly.

“Yeah, her.” Cross’s unlovely features creased into a salacious grin. “They still carry her tits around on festival days?”

“I’m afraid so.” She had always considered it an unfortunate custom, but the particularly horrible martyrdom of poor Saint Agnes was still commemorated in Palermo by a procession bearing the replicas of two severed breasts on a tray, like little nippled cakes.

“He thought a lot of Saint Agnes, Giorgio did. So you tell ’em.”

Adelia opened her mouth to tell
him
something, then saw the mercenary’s eyes and stopped. The man agonized for his dead friend, as he had agonized for the injured Poyns; there was a soul here, however ungainly.