The Serpent's Tale (33 page)

“I have been listening to the songs they sing to her, to the queen,” Mother Edyve said. “The viol and the young men’s voices—I have been sitting here and thinking about them.”

Adelia raised her eyebrows.

“What is it they sing of?” Mother Edyve asked.
“Cortez amors?”

“Courtly love. A Provençal phrase. Provençal fawning and sentimental rubbish.”

“Courtly love, yes. A serenade to the unattainable lady. It is most interesting—earthly love as ennoblement. We could say, could we not, that what those young men yearn for is a reflected essence of the Holy Mary.”

Silly old soul
, thought Adelia, savagely. “What those young men yearn for, Abbess, is not holiness. This song will end in a high-flown description of the secret arcade. It’s their name for the vagina.”

“Sex, of course,” said the abbess, amazingly, “but with a gentler longing than I have ever heard ascribed to it. Oh, yes, basically, they are singing to more than they know; they sing to God the Mother.”

“God the
Mother
?”

“God is both our father and our mother. How could it be otherwise? To create two sexes yet favor only one would be lopsided parentage, though Father Egbert chides me for saying so.”

No wonder Father Egbert chided; it was a wonder he didn’t excommunicate. God masculine and feminine?

Adelia, who considered herself a modern thinker, was confounded by a perception of an Almighty who, in every religion she knew of, had created weak and sinful woman for man’s pleasure, human ovens in which to bake his seed. A devout Jew thanked God daily that he had not been born female. Yet this little nun was plucking the beard from God’s chin and providing Him not only with the breasts but also with the mind of a female.

It was a philosophy of most profound rebellion. But now that Adelia came to consider her, Mother Edyve
was
a rebel, or she would not have been prepared to flout the Church by giving space in her graveyard to the body of a king’s whore. Only independence of mind could at the same time be extending charitable thought to a queen who had brought nothing but turbulence into the abbey with her.

“Yes,” the birdlike voice went on, “we grieve for the lopsidedness of the world as the Almighty Feminine must grieve for it. Yet God’s time is not our time, we are told; an age is but a blink of an eye to one who is Alpha and Omega.”

“Ye-es.” Frowning, Adelia moved nearer and sat sideways on the chancel steps, hugging her knees, staring at the still figure in the stall.

“I have been thinking that in Eleanor we are witnessing a blink,” it said.

“Eh?”

“Yes, for the first time to my knowledge, we have a queen who has raised her voice for the dignity of women.”

“Eh?”

“Listen,” the abbess said.

The trouvère in the cloister had finished composing his song. Now he was singing it, the lovely tenor of his voice flowing into the gray chapel like honey.
“Las! einssi ay de ma mort exemplaire, mais la doleur qu’il me convendra traire, douce seroit, se un tel espoir avoie…”

If the singer was dying of love, he’d chosen to set his pain to a melody as pretty as springtime. Despite herself, Adelia smiled; the combination ought to win him his lady, all right.

“…Dame, et se ja mes cuers riens entreprent, don’t mes corps ait honneur n’avancement, De vous venracom loneins que vos soie…”

So if his heart ever undertook anything that would bring him honor, it would come from the beloved, however far away she was.

The music that attended Eleanor wherever she went had, to Adelia’s indiscriminatory ear, been another of her affectations, the incipient background of a woman with every frailty ascribed to the feminine nature: vain, jealous, flighty, one who, in order to assert herself, had chosen to go to war to challenge a man greater than she was.

Yet the abbess was attending to it as if to holy script.

Attending to it with her, Adelia reconsidered. She’d dismissed the elaborate, sighing poetry of the male courtiers, their interest in dress, their perfumed curls, because she judged them by the standard of rough masculinity set by a rough male world.
Was
regard for gentleness and beauty decadent?
Rowley
, she thought, with a tearing rush of fondness,
would say that it was
—he loathed femininity in men; he equated his messenger’s liking for scent with the worst excesses of the Emperor Caligula.

Eleanor’s version, though, could hardly be decadence, because it was new. Adelia sat up.
By God, it was
new. The abbess was right; deliberately or not, the queen was carrying into the uncultured farmyard of her domains an image of women demanding respect, people to be considered and cherished for their personal value rather than as marketable goods. It demanded that men
deserve
women.

For a moment back there in the queen’s apartment, Eleanor had held Wolvercote up to her courtiers, not as a powerful male gaining what was his but as a brute beast dragging its prey into the forest to be gnawed.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said, almost reluctantly.

“…vous que j’aim tres loyaument…Ne sans amours, emprendre nel saroie.”

“But it’s a pretense, it’s artificial,” Adelia protested. “Love, honor, respect. When are they ever extended to everyday women? I doubt if that boy actually practices what he’s singing. It’s…it’s a pleasant hypocrisy.”

“Oh, I have a high regard for hypocrisy,” the little nun said. “It pays lip service to an ideal which must, therefore, exist. It recognizes that there is a Good. In its own way, it is a token of civilization. You don’t find hypocrisy among the beasts of the field. Nor in Lord Wolvercote.”

“What good does the Good do if it is not adhered to?”

“That is what I have been wondering,” Mother Edyve said calmly. “And I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the early Christians wondered it, too, and perhaps that Eleanor, in her fashion, has made a start by setting a brick in a foundation on which, with God’s help, our daughters’ daughters can begin to build a new and better Jerusalem.”

“Not in time for Emma,” Adelia said.

“No.”

Perhaps,
Adelia thought drearily,
it was only a very old woman who could look hopefully on a single brick laid in a wasteland.

They sat a while longer, listening. The singer had changed his tune and his theme.
“I would hold thee naked in my arms at eve, that we might be in ecstasy, my head against thy breast….”

“That, too, is love of a sort, nevertheless,” Mother Edyve said, “and perhaps all one to our Great Parent, who made our bodies as they are.”

Adelia smiled at her, thinking of being in bed with Rowley. “I have been convinced that it is.”

“So have I, which speaks well for the men we have loved.” There was a reflective sigh. “But don’t tell Father Egbert.”

The abbess got up with difficulty and tested her legs.

Warmed, Adelia went to help her settle her cloak. “Mother,” she said on impulse, “I am afraid for Dame Dakers’s safety.”

A heavily veined little hand flapped her away; Mother Edyve had become impatient to go. “You are a busy soul, child, and I am grateful for it, but you may leave Dakers’s safety to me.”

As she hobbled out, she said something else, but the words were indistinct, something like, “After all, I have the keys to the lockup.”

B
y the end of that day, Adelia had changed. Perhaps it was anger at Emma Bloat’s rape. Perhaps it was anger at the attempt on Dakers’s life. Perhaps it was the courage inspired by Mother Edyve.

Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t cower in the guesthouse anymore while murderers and abductors went unchecked.

In essence, the killer of Rosamund and Bertha had made a contract with her:
Leave me alone and your child is safe.

A shameful contract. Nevertheless, she would have abided by it, taking it as a given that he would not kill again.

But he’d tossed a burning rag through an aperture as if the living woman inside was rubbish.

I can’t allow that,
she told him.

S
he was afraid, very afraid indeed; her baby would have to be protected as no child ever had been, but she, Adelia, could not live,
her daughter
could not live, at the cost of other people’s deaths.

“Where you going?” Gyltha called after her.

“I’m going to ask questions.”

She found Jacques in the cloister, being taught how to play the viol by one of the troubadours. The courtiers were colonizing the place.
And the nuns,
she thought,
are now too intimidated by everything that has happened to stop them.

She dragged the unwilling messenger away toward the almonry and sat him and herself down on a mounting block.

“Yes, mistress?”

“I want you to help me find out who ordered the killing of Talbot of Kidlington.”

He was set aback. “I don’t know as I’m up to that, mistress.”

She ignored him and recounted the list of those she suspected: “Wolvercote, Master Warin, the gatekeeper, and the Bloats.” She went into detail.

He rubbed his chin; it was closely shaved now, like all the young men’s at Eleanor’s court.

“I can tell you one thing, if it helps,” he said. “Lawyer Warin made a to-do when he was introduced to my lord Wolvercote in church.
‘So honored to make your acquaintance, my lord. We have not met, but I have long wished to know
…’ He made a point of it—I was there and heard him. If he mentioned that they had not encountered each other before, he must have said it three or four times.”

“How did Wolvercote greet Master Warin?”

“Like he treats everybody, as if he’d been squirted out of a backside.” He grimaced, afraid of having offended her. “Sorry, mistress.”

“But you believe Warin was insisting they hadn’t met before when, really, they had?”

Jacques thought about it. “Yes, I do.”

Adelia was shivering. Ward had crept under her skirts and was pressing against her knees for warmth. A gargoyle on the gutter of the abbess’s house opposite gaped at her, its chin bearded with icicles.

I am watching you.

She said, “Emma thought kindly of Master Warin, which means that Talbot did, too, which also means the boy trusted him….”

“And confided his intention to elope?” The messenger was becoming interested.

“I know he did,” she said. “Emma told me so. The boy told Warin he was choosing his birthday as the day for the elopement so that he could take possession of his inheritance….”

“Which, unbeknownst, Master Warin had squandered…” This was exciting.

Adelia nodded. “Which, indeed, Master Warin may have squandered, thereby necessitating his young cousin’s removal…”

“…and it dawns on Master Warin that he has an ally in Lord Wolvercote. Old Wolfie will be deprived of a bride and a fortune if the elopement goes ahead.”

“Yes. So he approaches Lord Wolvercote and suggests Talbot should die.”

They sat back to think it through.

“Why was it so urgent that Talbot’s body be identified right away?” Adelia wondered.

“That’s easy, mistress. Lawyer Warin may be pressed for money—he looks a man who likes to live well. If he’s Talbot’s heir, it would take too long to prove to a coroner that the estate of the anonymous corpse was his. That takes a long time. Courts are slow. His creditors would come in before he inherited.”

“And it would suit Wolvercote for Emma to realize that her lover was dead. Yes, it’s all of a piece,” she said. “It was Wolvercote who provided the killers. Warin probably didn’t know any.”

“And got rid of them once they’d done the deed. It could be so, mistress.”

Talking it over had hardened the case for Adelia, turning theory to reality. Two men had conspired to blot out a young life. Wickedness was discussed in lawyers’ offices as business, considered in manor houses over a flagon of wine; men were instructed in it. Normality, goodness were commodities to be traded for greed. Innocence was helpless against it.
She
was helpless against it. It gibbered at her from the rooftops.

“How to prove it, though?” Jacques asked.

“Plotters distrust one another,” she said. “I think it can be done, but I shall need you to help me.”

She let him go then, and hurried back to the guesthouse, unable to shake off her fear for Allie.

“Right as a shilling,” Gyltha said. “Look at her.”

But Adelia knew that Gyltha, too, was afraid, because she’d told Mansur to move in with them, day and night.