The Serpent's Tale (30 page)

“That’s business,” Gyltha said. “That’s what high-ups’ marriage is, ain’t it?”

J
acques was kept busy that day, bringing messages to the women in the guesthouse. The first was from the prioress: “To Mistress Adelia, greetings from Sister Havis, and to say that the girl Bertha will be interred in the nuns’ own graveyard.”

“Christian burial. Thought you’d be pleased,” Gyltha said, watching Adelia’s reaction. “What you wanted, ain’t it?”

“It is. I’m glad.” The prioress had ended her investigation and managed to persuade the abbess that Bertha had not died by her own hand.

But Jacques hadn’t finished. He said dutifully, “And I was to warn you, mistress, you’re to remember the Devil walks the abbey.”

There lay the sting. The nuns’ agreement that a killer was loose in Godstow made his presence more real and added to its darkness.

Later still that morning, the messenger turned up again. “To Mistress Adelia, greetings from Mother Edyve, and will she return Mistress Emma to the cloister? To keep the peace, she says.”

“Whose peace?” Gyltha demanded. “I suppose them Bloats is complaining.”

“So is the Lord Wolvercote,” said Jacques. He grimaced, wrinkling his eyes and showing his teeth as one reluctant to deliver more bad news. “He’s saying…well, he’s saying…”

“What?”

The messenger blew out his breath. “It’s being said as how Mistress Adelia has put a spell on Mistress Emma and is turning her against her lawful husband-to-be.”

Gyltha stepped in. “You can tell that godless arse-headed bastard from me…”

A hand on her shoulder stopped her. Emma was already wrapping herself in her cloak. “There’s been trouble enough,” she said.

And was gone down the steps before any of them could move.

I
nside the abbey, the various factions trapped within its walls fractured like frozen glass. A darkness fell over Godstow that had nothing to do with the dimming winter light.

In protest against its occupation, the nuns disappeared into their own quadrangles, taking their meals from the infirmary kitchen, their exercise in the cloister.

The presence of two bands of mercenaries began to cause trouble. Schwyz’s were the more experienced, a cohesive group that had fought in wars all over Europe and considered Wolvercote’s men mere country ruffians hired for the rebellion—as, indeed, many of them were.

But the Wolvercoters had smarter livery, better arms, and a leader who was in charge—anyway, there were more of them; they bowed to nobody.

Schwyz’s men set up a still in the forge and got drunk; Wolvercote’s raided the convent cellar and got drunk. Afterward, inevitably, they fought one another.

The nights became dreadful. Godstow’s people and guests cowered in their rooms, listening to the fighting in the alleys, dreading a crashed-in door and the entry of liquored mercenaries with robbery or rape on their minds.

In an effort to protect their property and women, they formed a militia of their own. Mansur, Walt, Oswald, and Jacques, like dutiful men, joined it in patrolling—but the result was that, more often than not, the nightly brawls became tripartite affairs.

An attempt by the chaplain, Father Egbert, to minister to the flock the nuns had deserted ended when, during Sunday-evening communion, Schwyz shouted at Wolvercote, “Are you going to discipline your men, or do I do it for you?” and a fight broke out between their adherents that spread even to the Lady Chapel, smashing lamps, a lectern, and several heads. One of Wolvercote’s men lost an eye.

I
t was as if the world had frozen and would not turn, allowing no other weather to reach a beleaguered Oxfordshire than a bright sun by day and stars that filled the sky at night, neither bringing any relief from the cold.

Every morning, Adelia pushed open the shutters briefly to allow air into their room and searched the view for…what? Henry Plantagenet and his army? Rowley?

But Rowley was dead.

There had been more snow. It was impossible to distinguish river from land. There was no human life out there, hardly any animal life.

Crisscross patterns like stitching showed that birds, frantic with thirst, had hopped around in the early dawn to fill their beaks with snow, but where were they? Sheltering in the trees that stood like iron sentinels across the river, perhaps. Could they withstand this assault? Where were the deer? Did fish swim beneath that ice?

Watching a solitary crow flap its way across the blue sky, Adelia wondered whether it saw a dead, pristine world in which Godstow was the only circle of life. As she stared at it, the crow folded its wings and fell to earth, a small, untidy black casualty in the whiteness.

I
f the nights weren’t bad enough, Godstow’s days became morbid with the
hit-hit
of picks hacking out graves in the frozen earth while the church bell tolled and tolled for the dead as if it had lost the capacity to ring for anything else.

Adelia was keeping to the guesthouse as much as possible; the looks from people she encountered if she went out and their tendency to cross themselves and make the sign of the evil eye as they passed her were intimidating. But there were some funerals she had to attend.

Talbot of Kidlington’s, for one. The nuns reappeared for that. A little man at the front of the congregation, who Adelia supposed was the cousin, Master Warin, wept all through it, but Adelia, skulking at the back, saw only Emma, white and dry-eyed, in the choir, her hand clasped tightly in little Sister Priscilla’s.

A funeral for Bertha. This was held at night and in the privacy of the abbess’s chapel, attended by the convent chapter, the milkmaid, Jacques, and Adelia, who’d folded Bertha’s hands around a broken chain and a silver cross before the plain, pine coffin was interred in the nuns’ own graveyard.

A funeral for Giorgio, the Sicilian. No nuns this time, but most of the Schwyz mercenaries were there, and Schwyz himself. Mansur, Walt, and Jacques came, as they had to Talbot’s. So did Adelia. She’d begged a reluctant Sister Havis for Giorgio to be treated as a Christian, arguing that they knew no harm of him apart from his profession. Due to her, the Sicilian was lowered into a cold Christian grave with the blessing of Saint Agnes.

There was no word of thanks from his friend Cross. He left the graveyard after the interment without speaking, though later three pairs of beautifully fashioned bone skates complete with straps were left outside Adelia’s door.

A funeral for two Wolvercote villagers who’d succumbed to pneumonia. Sister Jennet and her nurses attended, though Lord Wolvercote did not.

A funeral for the two hanged men. Nobody except the officiating priest was present, though those bodies, too, each went into a churchyard grave.

His duty done, Father Egbert closed the church and, like the nuns, retired to an inner sanctum. He would not, he said, hold regular services when any mercenary was likely to be in the congregation; the advent of Christ’s birth was not to be despoiled by a load of feuding heathens who wouldn’t recognize the Dove of Peace if it shat on their heads. Which he hoped it would.

It was a sentence on the whole community. No
Christmas
?

A shriek went up, loudest of all from the Bloats; they’d come to see their girl married at the Yule feast. And their girl, thanks to malefic influence from a woman no better than she should be, was now saying she didn’t want to marry at all. This wasn’t what they paid their tithes for.

One voice, however, was raised above theirs. With more effect. Sister Bullard, the cellaress, was, materially, the most important person in the abbey and the one who’d become the most sorely tried. Even with the convent’s new militia trying to protect it, her great barn of a cellar suffered nightly raids on its ale tuns, wine vats, and foodstuff.

Worried that the entire convent would soon be unable to feed itself, she turned to the only earthly authority left to her—the Queen of England.

Eleanor had been staying to her own apartments, paying little attention to anything except the effort to keep herself amused. Finding the rest of the abbey tedious, she had ignored its troubles. However, marooned as she was on the island of Godstow for the duration of the snow, she had to listen to Sister Bullard telling her that she faced discord and starvation.

The queen woke up.

Lord Wolvercote and Master Schwyz were summoned to her rooms in the abbess’s house, where it was pointed out to them that only under her banner could they attract allies—and she had no intention of leading rabble, which, at the moment, was what they and their men were becoming.

Rules were laid down. Church services would resume—to be attended only by the sober. Wolvercote’s men must cross the bridge each night to sleep at their lord’s manor in the village, leaving only six of their number behind to join Schwyz’s men in enforcing the curfew.

No more raids on the cellar by either side—any mercenary doing so, or found fighting, was to be publicly flogged.

Of the two culprits, Lord Wolvercote should have come out of the meeting better; Schwyz, after all, was being paid for his services, whereas Wolvercote was rendering his for free. But the Abbot of Eynsham was also present, and, as well as being a friend to Schwyz, he had the cleverer and more persuasive tongue.

It was noted by those who saw Lord Wolvercote emerge from the queen’s presence that he was snarling. “A’cause he don’t get young Emma, neither,” Gyltha reported. “Not yet, at any rate.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain sure,” Gyltha said. “The girl’s been pleading with Mother Edyve, and she’s asked for Eleanor’s protection. The which the queen says old Wolfie ought to wait.”

Again, this had come from the convent kitchen, where Gyltha’s friend Polly had helped the royal servants carry refreshment to the meeting between the queen and the mercenary leaders. Polly had learned many things, one of them being that the queen had complied with Mother Edyve’s request for Emma’s marriage to Wolvercote to be delayed indefinitely, “until the young woman has recovered from the affliction to her spirits that now attends them.”

Polly reported that “his Wolfie lordship weren’t best pleased.”

Adelia, relieved, didn’t think the Bloats would be, either. But by now, everybody knew what the affliction was that attended Emma’s spirits and, according to Gyltha, there was general sympathy for her, much of which sprang from the equally general dislike for Wolvercote.

There was more good news from the kitchen. With order restored, Eleanor had, apparently, announced that the church was to be reopened, services resumed, and, when it came, Christ’s Mass to be celebrated with a feast.

“Proper old English one, too,” Gyltha said, a pagan gleam in her eye. “Caroling, feastin’, mummers, Yule log, and all the trimmin’s. They’re killin’ the geese and hangin’ them this very minute.”

It was typical of Eleanor, Adelia thought, that having saved the convent’s store of food and drink, she now imperiled it. Feasting the entire community would be an enormous and expensive undertaking. On the other hand, the queen’s orders had been necessary and perceptive; they might well defuse a situation that was becoming intolerable. And if a feast could introduce gaiety into Godstow, by God, it needed it.

W
ith the resurgence of Eleanor’s energy came an invitation. “To Mistress Adelia, a summons from her gracious lady, Queen Eleanor.” Jacques brought it.

“You running errands for royalty now?” Gyltha asked at the door. The messenger had found brighter clothes from somewhere, curled hair hid his ears, and his perfume reached Adelia, who was across the room.

He’d also found a new dignity. “Mistress, I am so favored. And now I must go to the Lord Mansur. He, too, is summoned.”

Gyltha watched him go. “Aping they courtiers,” she said with disapproval. “Our Rowley’ll kick his arse for him when he comes back.”

“Rowley’s not coming back,” Adelia said.

W
hen Mansur strode into the royal chamber, one of the courtiers muttered audibly, “And now we entertain heathens.” And as Adelia followed behind with Ward ambling at her heels, “Oh, Lord,
look
at that cap. And the
dog
, my dear.”

Eleanor, however, was all kindness. She came sweeping forward, offering her hand to be kissed. “My Lord Mansur, how pleased we are to see you.” To Adelia: “My dear child, we have been remiss. We have been kept busy with matters of state, of course, but even so I fear we have neglected one with whom I fought against the devil’s spawn.”

The long upper room had been the abbess’s, but now it was definitely Eleanor’s. For surely Mother Edyve had not scented it with the richness of the heathen East nor filled it with artifacts so colorful—shawls, cushions, a gloriously autumnal triptych—that they eliminated the naïve, biblical pastels on her walls. Mother Edyve had never knelt at a prie-dieu made from gold, nor would her bedposts have roared with carved lions, nor had gossamer, floating like cobwebs, descended from the bed’s tester over her pillow, nor male courtiers like adoring statuary, nor a beautiful minstrel to fill the abbatial air with a love song.