The Serpent's Tale (6 page)

The secretary, disregarded by everybody, ate like a man with hollow legs, though his eyes were always on his master, as if watching for further unepiscopal behavior.

The bishop explained the circumstances that had brought him hurrying from Oxford, part of his diocese, and tomorrow would take him to Normandy to search out the king and tell him, before anybody else did, that Rosamund Clifford, most beloved of all the royal mistresses, had been fed poisonous mushrooms.

“Mushrooms?” Gyltha asked. “Could’ve been mischance, then. Tricky things, mushrooms, you got to be careful.”

“It was deliberate,” the bishop said. “Believe me, Gyltha, this was not an accident. She became very ill. It was why they called me to Wormhold, to her sickbed; they didn’t think she’d recover. Thanks to the mercy of Christ, she did, but the king will wish to know the identity of the poisoner, and I want, I
have
, to assure him that his favorite investigator is looking into the matter….” He remembered to bow to Mansur, who bowed back. “Along with his assistant.” A bow to Adelia.

She was relieved that he was maintaining the fiction in front of Father Paton that it was Mansur who possessed the necessary skills for such an investigation—not her. He had betrayed himself to a charge of immorality by saying that Allie was his, but he was protecting her from the much more serious charge of witchcraft.

Gyltha, enjoying her role as interrogator, said, “Can’t’ve been the queen sent her them mushrooms, can it? Her being in chains and all?”

“I wish she
had
been in bloody chains.” Rowley was Rowley again for a moment, furious and making his secretary blink. “The blasted woman escaped. Two weeks ago.”

“Deary dear,” Gyltha said.

“Deary dear indeed, and was last seen heading for England, which, in everybody’s opinion bar mine, would give her time to poison a dozen of Henry’s whores.”

He leaned across the table to Adelia, sweeping a space between them, spilling his wine bowl and hers. “
You
know him, you know his temper.
You’ve
seen him out of control. He loves Rosamund, truly loves her. Suppose he shouts for Eleanor’s death like he shouted for Becket’s? He won’t mean it, but there’s always some bastard with a reason to respond who’ll say he’s doing it on the king’s orders, like they did with Becket. And if their mother’s executed,
all
the boys will rise up against their father like a tide of shit.”

He sat back in his chair. “Civil war? It’ll be here, everywhere. Stephen and Matilda will be nothing to it.”

Mansur put his hand protectively on Gyltha’s shoulder. The silence was turbulent, as if from noiseless battle and dumbed shrieks of the dying. The ghost of a murdered archbishop rose up from the stones of Canterbury and stalked the room.

Father Paton was staring from face to face, puzzled that his bishop should be addressing the doctor’s assistant with such vehemence, and not the doctor.

“Did she do it?” Adelia asked at last.

“No.” Rowley wiped some grease off his sleeve with a napkin, and replenished his bowl.

“Are you sure?”

“Not Eleanor. I know her.”

Does he?
Undoubtedly, there was tender regard between queen and bishop; when Eleanor and Henry’s firstborn son had died at the age of three, Eleanor had wanted the child’s sword taken to Jerusalem so that, in death, little William might be regarded as a holy crusader. It was Rowley who’d made the terrible journey and lain the tiny sword on the high altar—so
of course
Eleanor looked on Rowley kindly.

But like everything else in royal matters, it was King Henry who’d arranged it, Henry who’d given Rowley his orders, Henry who’d received the intelligence of what was going on in the Holy Land that Rowley’d brought back with him. Oh, yes, Rowley Picot had been more the king’s agent than the queen’s sword carrier.

But still claiming special knowledge of Eleanor’s character, the bishop added, “Face-to-face, she’d tear Rosamund’s throat out…but not poison. It’s not her style.”

Adelia nodded. She said in Arabic, “I still don’t see what you want of me. I am a doctor to the dead….”

“You have a logical mind,” the bishop said, also in Arabic. “You see things others don’t. Who saved the Jews from the accusation of child murder last year? Who found the true killer?”

“I had assistance.” That good little man Simon of Naples, the
real
investigator who had come with her from Salerno for the purpose and had died for it.

Mansur, unusual for him, struck in, indicating Adelia. “She must not be put in such danger again. The will of Allah and only the will of Allah saved her from the pit last time.”

Adelia smiled fondly at him. Let him attribute it to Allah if he liked. Actually, she had survived the child killer’s lair only because a dog had led Rowley to it in time. What neither he, nor God, nor Allah
had
saved her from were memories of a nightmare that still reenacted themselves in her daily life as sharply as if they were happening all over again—often, this time, to young Allie.

“Of course she won’t be in danger again,” the bishop told Mansur with energy. “This case is completely different. There’s been no murder here, only a clumsy attempt at one. Whoever tried to do it is long gone. But don’t you see?” Another bowl tipped as he thumped the board. “
Don’t you see? Everybody
will believe Eleanor to be the poisoner; she hates Rosamund
and
she was possibly in the neighborhood. Wasn’t that Gyltha’s immediate conclusion? Won’t it be the world’s?” He took his eyes away from Mansur and to the woman opposite him. “In the name of God, Adelia,
help me.
”

With a jerk of her chin toward the door, Gyltha nudged Mansur, who nodded, rose, and took an unwilling Father Paton by the scruff of his neck.

The two who remained seated at the table didn’t notice their going. The bishop’s gaze was on Adelia; hers on her clasped hands.

Stop resenting him,
she was thinking.
It wasn’t abandonment; mine was the refusal to marry, only mine the insistence we shouldn’t meet again. It is illogical to blame him for keeping to the agreement.

Damn him, though, there should have been
something
all these months—at least an acknowledgment of the baby.

“How are you and God getting along?” she asked.

“I serve Him, I hope.” She heard amusement in his voice.

“Good works?”

“When I can.”

She thought,
And we both know, don’t we, that you would sacrifice God and His works, me and your daughter, all of us, if doing so would serve Henry Plantagenet.

He said quietly, “I apologize for this, Adelia. I would not have broken our agreement not to meet again for anything less.”

She said, “If Eleanor
is
proved guilty, I won’t lie. I shall say so.”

“Ya-
hah.
” Now
that
was Rowley, the energy, the shout that shivered the wine in its jug—here, for an instant, was her joyous lover back again.

“Couldn’t resist, could you? Are you taking the baby with you? Yes, of course, you’ll still be breast-feeding—damned odd to think of you as lactating stock.”

He was up and had opened the door, calling for Paton. “There’s a basket of mushrooms in my pack. Find it and bring it here.” He turned to Adelia, grinning. “Thought you’d want to see some evidence.”

“You devil,” she said.

“Maybe, but this devil will save its king and its country or die trying.”

“Or kill me in the process.”
Stop it,
she thought,
stop sounding like a wronged woman; it was your decision.

He shrugged. “You’ll be safe enough, nobody’s out to poison
you.
You’ll have Gyltha and Mansur—God help anyone who touches you while they’re around—and I’m sending servants along. I presume that canine eyesore goes, too?”

“Yes,” she said. “His name’s Ward.”

“One more of the prior’s finds to keep you safe? I remember Safeguard.”

Another creature that had died saving her life. The room was full of memories that hurt—and with the dangerous value of being shared.

“Paton is
my
watchdog,” he said conversationally. “He guards my virtue like a bloody chastity belt. Incidentally, wait until you see Fair Rosamund’s labyrinth—biggest in Christendom. Mind you, wait til you see Fair Rosamund herself, she’s not what you’d expect. In fact—”

She interrupted. “Is it at risk?”

“The labyrinth?”

“Your virtue.”

All at once, he was being kind. “Oddly enough, it isn’t. I thought when you turned me down…but God was kind and tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.”

“And when Henry needed a compliant bishop.”
Stop it, stop it.

“And the world needed a doctor, not another wife,” he said, still kind. “I see that now; I have prayed to see it; marriage would have wasted you.”

Yes, yes.
If she had agreed to marriage, he’d have refused the bishopric the king had urged on him for political expediency, but for her, there had been the higher priority of her calling. She’d have had to abandon it—he’d demanded a wife, not a doctor, especially not a doctor to the dead.

In the end,
she thought,
neither of us would bestow the ultimate, sacrificial gift on the other.

He got up and went to the baby, making the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. “Bless you, my daughter.” He turned back. “Bless you, too, mistress,” he said. “God keep you both safe, and may the peace of Jesus Christ prevail over the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” He sighed. “For I can hear the sound of their hooves.”

Father Paton came in carrying a basket and gave it to his lordship, who then gestured for him to leave.

Adelia was still staring at Rowley. Among all this room’s superfluity of wealth, the turmoil she’d experienced in it as shades of the past came and went, one thing that should belong to it—its very purpose—had been missing; she had just caught its scent, clear and cold: sanctity, the last attribute she’d expected to find in him. Her lover had become a man of God.

He took the chair beside her to give her details of the attempt on Rosamund’s life, putting the basket in front of her so that she could examine its contents. In the old days, he couldn’t have sat beside her without touching her; now it was like sitting next to a hermit.

Rosamund loved stewed mushrooms, he told her; it was well known. A lazy servant, out gathering them for her mistress, had been handed some by an old, unidentified woman, a crone, and had taken them back without bothering to pick more.

“Rosamund didn’t eat them all, some had been kept for later, and while I was with her I took the remainder to bring with me. I thought you might be able to identify the area they came from or something—you know about mushrooms, don’t you?”

Yes, she knew about mushrooms. Obediently, Adelia began turning them over with her knife while he talked.

It was a fine collection, though withering now: boletes that the English called Slippery Jack, winter oysters, cauliflower, blewits, hedgehogs. All very tasty but extraordinarily,
most
extraordinarily, varied; some of these species grew exclusively on chalk, some under pine trees, others in fields, others in broadleaf woodland.

Deliberately or not, whoever gathered these had spread the net wide and avoided picking a basketful that could be said to come from a specific location.

“As I say, it was quite deliberate,” the bishop was saying. “The crone, whoever she was, made a point of it—they were for the Lady Rosamund, nobody else. Whoever that crone was, she hasn’t been seen since. Disappeared. Slipped in a couple of malignant ones, do you see, hoping they’d poison the poor woman, and it’s only through the mercy of God…”

“She’s dead, Rowley,” Adelia said.

“What?”

“If these fungi duplicate what Rosamund ate, she’s dead.”

“No, I told you, she recovered. Much better when I left her.”

“I know.” Adelia was suddenly so sorry for him; if she could have changed what she was going to say, she would have. “But it’s what happens, I’m afraid.” She speared the killer with her knife and lifted it. “It’s a feature of this one that those who eat it apparently get better for a while.”

Innocuous-looking, white-gilled, its cap now aged into an ordinary brown but still retaining a not unpleasant smell. “It’s called the Death Cap. It grows everywhere; I’ve seen it in Italy, Sicily, France, here in England; I’ve seen its effect, I’ve worked on the corpses who ate it—too many of them. It is always,
always
fatal.”

“No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so
sorry,
but if she ate one of these, even a tiny bite…” He had to know. “Sickness and diarrhea at first, abdominal pain, and then a day or two when she’d seem to be recovering. But all the while the poison was attacking her liver and kidneys. There’s absolutely no cure. Rowley, I’m afraid she’s gone.”