The Serpent’s Tale

ELEVEN

The instinct was to hide with Allie in the metaphorical long grass, like a hare and leveret in their form.

When the queen sent Jacques to inquire for her, Adelia sent back that she was ill and could not come.

The killer conversed with her in her head.

How submissive are you now?

Submissive, my lord. Totally submissive. I shall do nothing to displease you, just don’t hurt Allie.

She knew him now, not who he was but what he was. Even as he’d plucked Allie’s cradle from under the sleeping Gyltha’s hand and put it on the steps, he’d revealed himself.

Such a simple expedient to reduce his opponent to impotence. If she didn’t fear him so much, she could admire it-the audacity, the economy, the imagination of it.

And it had told her for which killings he had been responsible.

There had been two lots of murder, she knew that now, neither one having anything to do with the other; only the fact that she’d witnessed the corpses of both within a short time had given them a seeming relationship.

Talbot of Kidlington’s death was the most straightforward, because it had been for the oldest of reasons: gain.

Wolvercote had good reason to kill the boy; the elopement with Emma would have deprived him of a valuable bride.

Or the inheritance Talbot had gained on his twenty-first birthday would have deprived his guardian of an income, for Master Warin could have been defrauding the boy-it wasn’t unknown for an heir to come into his estates only to find that they’d gone.

Or, and this was a possibility Emma herself had raised while not believing it, Fitchet had alerted two friends to the fact that a young man would be arriving at the convent by night with money in his purse. After all, the gatekeeper had been acting as go-between for the two lovers-presumably for a fee-which indicated he was corruptible.

Or-the least likely-the Bloats had discovered their daughter’s plan and had hired killers to prevent it.

Such was Talbot’s murder.

Yet not one on the list of his likely killers fitted the character of the man who’d crept into the guesthouse and put Allie’s cradle on the steps outside. The smell of him was different, it had none of the direct brutality with which Talbot had been eliminated.

No, this man was…what? Sophisticated? Professional? I do not kill unless I must. I have given you a warning. I trust you will heed it.

He was the murderer of Rosamund and Bertha.

There was more snow. The sides of the track that had been dug down to the Thames fell in under it.

It was left to Gyltha to fetch their meals from the kitchen, to empty their chamber pots in the latrine, and to gather firing from the woodpile.

“Ain’t we ever a’going to take that poor baby for some air?” she wanted to know.

“No.”

I am outside, watching. How submissive are you?

Totally submissive, my lord. Don’t hurt my child.

“Nobody can’t snatch her, not with that old Arab along of us.”

“No.”

“We stay here, then, with the door barred?”

“Yes.”

But of course, they couldn’t…

The first alarm came at night. Somewhere a handbell was ringing and people were shouting.

Gyltha leaned out of the window to the alley. “They’re yellin’ fire,” she said. “I can smell smoke. Oh, dear Lord, preserve us.”

Bundling Allie into her furs, they dressed themselves, snatching up what belongings they could before carrying her down the steps.

Fire, that greatest of threats, had brought out everybody on this side of the abbey. Fitchet came running from the gates carrying two buckets; men were emerging out of the guesthouse: Mansur, Master Warin.

“Where is it? Where is it?”

The ringing and hubbub was coming from the direction of the pond.

“Barn?”

“Lockup, sounds like.”

“Oh, God,” Adelia said. “Dakers.” She handed Allie to Gyltha and began running.

Between the pond and the lockup, Peg was swinging a bell as if she were thwacking an unruly cow with it. She’d seen the flames on her way to the milking. “Up there.” She pointed with the bell toward the narrow slit that allowed air into the little beehive building of stone that was the convent lockup.

Volunteers, already forming a line, shouted to hasten the smith as he hammered an iron spar into the pond to gain water for their pails.

Mansur came up beside Adelia. “I smell no fire.”

“Neither do I.” There was a slight smitch in the air, nothing more, and no flames apparent in the lockup’s slit.

“Well, there damn was,” Peg said.

The door to the lockup opened and a bad-tempered sentry came out. “Oh, get on home,” he shouted. “No need for this rumpus. Straw caught fire, is all. I stamped it out.” It was Cross. He locked the door behind him and gestured at the crowd with his spear. “Go on. Get off with you.”

Relieved, grumbling, people began to disperse.

Adelia stayed where she was.

“What is it?” Mansur asked.

“I don’t know.”

Cross leveled his spear at her as she came up to him from the shadows. “Get back there, nothing to see. Go home…oh, it’s you, is it?”

“Is she all right?”

“Old Mother Midnight? She’s all right. Hollered a bit, but she’s dandy in there now, bloody sight dandier than it is out here. Warm. Gets her meals regular. What about the poor buggers got to guard her, that’s what I say.”

“What started the fire?”

Cross looked shifty. “Reckon as she kicked the brazier over.”

“I want to see her.”

“That you don’t. Captain Schwyz told me: ‘No bugger talks to her. No bugger to go near ’cept to bring her meals. And keep the bloody door locked.’”

“And who told Schwyz? The abbot?”

Cross shrugged.

“I want to see her,” Adelia said again.

Mansur reached out and took the spear from the mercenary’s hand with the ease of pulling up a weed.

Blowing out his cheeks, Cross unlatched an enormous key from his belt and put it in the lock. “Just a peep, mind. Captain’s bound to be here in a minute; he’ll have heard the rumpus. Bloody peasants, bloody rumpus.”

It was only a peep. Mansur had to lift Adelia up so that she could see over the mercenary’s shoulder as he blocked the door to stop them from going in.

What light there was inside came from burning logs in a brazier. Except for an ashy patch on one side, a deep ring of straw circled the curve of the stone walls. Something moved in it.

Adelia was reminded of Bertha. For a moment, a pair of eyes in the straw reflected the glow from the brazier and then disappeared.

Boots could be heard crunching the ice as their owner came toward them. Cross tore his spear away from Mansur. “Captain’s coming. Get away, for God’s sake.”

They got away.

“Yes?” Mansur asked as they walked.

“Somebody tried to burn her to death,” Adelia said. “The slit’s up on the back wall, on the opposite side from the entrance. I think somebody tossed a lighted rag through it. If Cross was guarding the door, he wouldn’t have seen who it was. But he knows it happened.”

“The Fleming said the brazier tipped over.”

“No. It’s bolted to the floor. There was no sign that a brand fell out of it. Somebody wanted to kill her, and it wasn’t Cross.”

“She is a sad, mad bint. Perhaps she tried to burn herself.”

“No.” It was a natural progression. Rosamund, Bertha, Dakers. All three had known-in Dakers’s case, still did-something they should not.

If it hadn’t been for Cross’s quick reaction in putting the fire out, the last of them would have been silenced.

Early the next morning, armed mercenaries broke into the chapel where the nuns were at prayer and carried off Emma Bloat.

Adelia, sleeping in, heard of it when Gyltha came scurrying back from the kitchen where she’d been to fetch their breakfast. “Poor thing, poor thing. Terrible to-do ’twas. Prioress tried to stop ’em and they knocked her down. In her own chapel. Knocked her down.”

Adelia was already dressing. “Where did they take Emma?”

“Village. Wolvercote it was, and his bloody Flemings. Carried her to his manor. Screaming, so they said, poor thing, poor thing.”

“Can’t they get her back?”

“The nuns is gone after her, but what can they do?”

By the time Adelia reached the gates, the rescue party of nuns was returning across the bridge, empty-handed.

“Can nothing be done?” Adelia asked as they went by.

Sister Havis was white-faced and had a cut below her eye. “We were turned back at spearpoint. One of his men laughed at us. He said it was legal because they had a priest.” She shook her head. “What sort of priest I don’t know.”

Adelia went to the queen.

Eleanor had just been acquainted with the news herself and was raging at her courtiers. “Do I command savages? The girl was under my protection. Did I or did I not tell Wolvercote to give her time?”

“You did, lady.”

“She must be fetched back. Tell Schwyz-where is Schwyz?-tell him to gather his men…” She looked around. Nobody hadmoved. “Well?”

“Lady, I fear the…um…damage is done.” This was the Abbot of Eynsham. “It appears that Wolvercote keeps a hedge priest in the village. The words were said.”

“Not by the girl, I’ll warrant, not under those circumstances. Were her parents present?”

“Apparently not.”

“Then it is abduction.” Eleanor’s voice was shrill with the desperation of a ruler losing control of the ruled. “Are my orders to be ignored in such a fashion? Are we living in the caves of brute beasts?”

Apart from Adelia’s, the queen’s was the only anger in the room. Others, the men, anyway, were disturbed, displeased, but also faintly, very faintly, amused. A woman, as long as it wasn’t their own, carried off and bedded was broad comedy.

There was an embryonic wink in the abbot’s eye as he said, “I fear our lord Wolvercote has taken the Roman attitude towards our poor Sabine.”

There was nothing to be done. Words had been said by a priest; Emma Bloat was married. Like it or not, she had been deflowered and-as it was in every male mind-probably enjoyed it.

Helpless, Adelia left the room, unable to bear its company.

In the cloister walk, one of Eleanor’s young men, lost to everything about him, was blocking the way as he walked up and down, strumming a viol and trying out a new song.

Adelia gave him a push that sent him staggering. The door of the abbey chapel at the end of the cloister beckoned to her, and she marched in, only knowing, on finding it blessedly empty, that she was wild for a solace that-and she knew this, too-could not be granted.

She went to her knees in the nave.

Dear Mother of God, protect and comfort her.

The icy, incense-laden air held only the reply: She is cattle as you are cattle. Put up with it.

Adelia pummeled the stones and made her accusation out loud. “Rosamund dead, Bertha dead. Emma raped. Why do You allow it?”

The reply came: “There will be medicine for our complaint eventually, my child. You of all people, with your mastery of healing, should know that.”

The voice was a real one, dry and seemingly without human propulsion, as if it rustled out of the mouth on its own wings to flutter down from the tiny choir to the nave.

Mother Edyve was so small, she was almost hidden in the stall in which she sat, her hands folded on her walking stick, her chin on her hands.

Adelia got up. She said, “I have intruded, Mother. I’ll go.”

The voice alighted on her as she made for the door. “Emma was nine years old when she came to Godstow, bringing joy to us all.”

Adelia turned back. “No joy now, not for her, not for you,” she said.

Unexpectedly, Mother Edyve asked, “How is Queen Eleanor taking the news?”

“With fury.” Because she was sour with a fury of her own, Adelia said, “Angry because Wolvercote has flaunted her, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Mother Edyve rubbed her chin against her folded hands. “You are unjust, I think.”

“To Eleanor? What can she do except rant? What can any of us do? Your joyful child’s enslaved for life to a pig, and even the Queen of England is helpless.”

“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.”

By 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.

She 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.

“Anyone as doesn’t like it can go and…well, you know what,” she said. “So you do what you got to do. Mansur’s on guard.”

But so was the killer…

Now she had to go and see Father Paton.

This time she did it carefully, waiting until night, watching for watchers, slipping from shadow to shadow until she was protected by the narrow walk that led to the warming room stairs.

Sister Lancelyne was at Vespers, and the little priest was alone, poring over the cartulary by candlelight, none too pleased to be interrupted.

Adelia told him everything, everything, beginning with finding Talbot’s body on the bridge-the little priest might have missed it while he’d been keeping warm in the cart-proceeding to the happenings at Wormhold, to the return to Godstow and the death of Bertha, her suspicions of who did what, the threat to Allie, the threat to Dame Dakers.

He didn’t want to hear it. He kept shifting and glancing longingly at the documents open in front of him. This was a tale reeking of the cardinal sins, and Father Paton preferred humanity in the abstract. “Are you certain?” he kept asking. “Surely not. How dare you reckon such things?”

Adelia persisted, skewering him with logic like a pin through a butterfly. She didn’t like him much; he didn’t like her at all, but he was separated from the battle in which she was engaged, and his mind was like one of his own ledgers; she needed it as a register.

“You must keep it all very, very secret,” she told him. “Mention it to nobody except the king.” This bloodless little man had to be the repository of her knowledge so that, in the event of her death, he could pass it on to Henry Plantagenet. “When the king comes, he will know what to do.”

“But I do not.”

“Yes, you do.” And she told him what it was that he must look for.

“This is impudence.” He was shocked. “In any case, I doubt that, even if it is extant, it will prove your case.”

Adelia doubted it, too, but it was all she had in her armory. She attempted an encouragement that she didn’t feel. “The king will come,” she said, “and he will prevail in the end.” That was her only certainty. Eleanor might be extraordinary, but she had pitted herself against one who straddled his kingdom like a colossus; she could not win.

There Father Paton agreed with her. “Yes, yes,” he said, “a queen is only a woman, unable to fight any cause successfully, let alone her own. All she may expect is God’s punishment for rebelling against her rightful lord.”

He turned on Adelia. “You, too, mistress, are a mere woman, sinful, impertinent, and right or wrong, you should not be questioning your betters.”

She held her temper and instead dangled a carrot. “When the king does come,” she said, “he’ll want to know who murdered Rosamund. There will be advancement for the man that can tell him who it was.”

She watched the priest’s mouth purse as he entered possible promotion to an abbacy, even a bishopric, into a mental balance sheet against the risk and lèse-majesté of what he was being asked to do.

“I suppose I shall be serving God, who is all truth,” he said slowly.

“You will,” she said, and left him to get on with it.

And then it was Christmas.

The church was so packed with bodies for Angel Mass that it was actually hot, and the smell of humanity threatened to overwhelm the fresh, bitter scent of holly and ivy garlands.

Adelia almost sweltered in her beaver cloak. She kept it on because, underneath, she was wearing the bliaut that Eleanor’s seamstresses had finished just in time and knew that she looked so nice in it, with all the other trimmings the queen had given her, that she felt she would attract attention.

“You show yourself,” Gyltha had protested. “You don’t look half bad.” Which, from her, was praise.

But the instinct to keep out of the killer’s eye was still strong. Perhaps she would take off her cloak at the coming feast; perhaps she wouldn’t.

The choir stalls, once more reserved for the nuns, provided a black-and-white edging to the embroidered, bedecked altar with its blaze of candles and the robes of the abbot and two priests as they moved through the litany like glowing chess pieces.

The magic was infallible.

The queue for Communion included murderous men, hostile factions, every gamut of human weakness and sorrow, yet, as it moved quietly forward, it was gripped by the same awe. At the rail, the miller knelt beside one of the men who had belabored him. Adelia received the host from the Abbot of Eynsham, whose hands rested for a second in blessing on the head of Baby Allie. The cup passed from a Wolvercote mercenary to one of Schwyz’s before each lumbered back to his place, chewing and exalted.

There was common and growing breathlessness as Mary labored in her stable a few yards away. The running footfalls of the shepherds came nearer and nearer. Angels chanted above the starlit, snow-stacked church roof.

When the abbot, raising his arms, announced a deep-throated “The Child is born,” his exhortation to go in peace was lost in a great shout of congratulation, several of the women yelling advice on breast-feeding to the invisible but present Mary and prompting her to “make sure and wrap that baby up warm now.”

Bethlehem was here. It was now.

As Adelia filed into the great barn, Jacques pushed through the crowd to touch her shoulder. “The queen’s greeting, mistress, and she will be disappointed if you are not wearing the gifts she gave you.”

Reluctantly, Adelia took off her cloak with its hood, revealing the bliaut and the barbette, and felt naked. Walt, who was beside her, looked at her and stared. “Wondered who this stranger was,” he said. She supposed that, too, was a compliment. And indeed, she received a lot of surprised looks-most of them friendly. For this was another gift Eleanor had, unconsciously, given her; by showing her favor, the queen had cleansed her of the taint of witchcraft.

Though Eleanor and her court had made plans for its entertainments, the feast in the barn was expropriated by the English.

Expropriated? It was run away with.

Charming Aquitanian carols were drowned in roaring wassails as the flaming Yule log, dragged in on the end of a harness by an ox, was set on a hearth in the middle of the great square formed by the tables in the barn. A minstrel in the gallery-actually, the hayloft-tried singing to the diners, but since, it turned out, all the convent’s people and most of the village had been invited and were making too much noise to hear him, he gave up and descended to eat with the rest.

It was a Viking meal. Meat and more meat. The icehouse had yielded its best. Eleanor’s cook had, literally, battled for his art in the kitchen, but his winter sallats and frumenty, his pretty painted pastry castles and delicate flower-water jellies had been so overwhelmed and dripped on by lard and blood-gravy that he’d been taken poorly and now sat staring into space as his apprentice popped comforting little squares of roast pork into his mouth.

There were no courses, either. The convent servants had coped for too long with Godstow’s overflowing and demanding guests, and the advent of Christmas had worked them even harder. They’d spent the last few days in the scorching heat of cooking fires and in decorating the barn until it resembled a glade in a forest; they weren’t bloody going to miss the feast for which they’d sweated by running back and forth to the kitchens. Everything they’d cooked-savory, sweet, sauced, plain, breads and pudding-was dumped on the tables in one glorious heap while they clambered onto the benches nearest the barn doors to enjoy it.

This was a good thing; there was so much carving to be done at once, so much handing of dishes up and down the tables, so many shouts back and forth for “some of that stuffing for my lady,” “a slice off the gander, if you please,” “pass up the turnip mash, there” that a camaraderie of gustation grew between high and low, though it did not extend to the dogs waiting under the tables for scraps and squabbling when one fell their way.

Ward kept close to Adelia’s knees, where he was fed royally-his mistress was a small eater and, in order not to offend Mansur, who was sitting beside her and kept heaping her platter, she secretly slipped hunks of meat to her dog.

Eleanor, Adelia saw, was taking it all well. With good humor, the queen had put on the monstrous crown of ivy and bay leaves presented to her by the smith’s wife, thereby ruining her own simple headdress and adding to the growing paganism of the night by her sudden resemblance to an earth goddess.

Apart from the royal cook, the only person to take no part in the jollity was Emma, a glacial, unmoving figure sitting next to her husband, who ignored her. Adelia tried to catch her eye, and then didn’t; the girl looked at nothing.

How were Master and Mistress Bloat going to deal with the situation? Adelia wondered. Were they condemning the abduction of their daughter?

No, they’d decided to overlook it. They’d placed themselves on the inner side of one of the tables opposite the abductor, though Wolvercote was rebuffing most of their attempts to engage him in conversation.

Master Bloat even tried to stand up and make a toast to the happy couple, but the volume of noise increased alarmingly as he did so, and Emma, coming to life for the first time, regarded her father with a look so bitter that the man’s words withered in his mouth and he sat down again.

With Mansur on her left and Allie tied firmly in a sling to her hip-there was to be no more abduction of daughters-Adelia turned her attention to the man on her right. She had taken pains to get a seat next to him.

Master Warin had kept to himself until now, and the fact that he had to ask her, politely, who she was and did not react unfavorably when she told him her name showed that he had been isolated from convent gossip.

He had a nervous habit of licking his lips and had none of the smooth superiority of most lawyers, an unremarkable person who’d softened but did not try to hide a strong Gloucestershire accent. Adelia got the impression that gaining legal qualification had been hard for him, both financially and intellectually, and that he confined himself to consilio et auxilio, advising on wills, assarts, boundary disputes, contracts of service, all the minutiae of everyday law, though important enough to those involved with them.

When she commiserated with him on the death of his young cousin, he wet his lips again and real tears came into his shortsighted eyes: The murder had bereft him of family, he told her, since he had no wife as yet. “How I envy you this bonny little girl, mistress. I would dearly like children.”

Adelia had built a case against the lawyer. She had to keep reminding herself that somebody had passed on the information that led to killers waiting on the bridge for Talbot of Kidlington, and none was more likely than this little man, who said of Talbot, “We were closer than cousins. He was my younger brother after his parents died. I looked after him in everything.”

But while it was modest, his clothing was of a quality not to be expected of a family lawyer, and the large seal ring on his finger was entirely of gold; Master Warin did himself well. Also, his taste did not run to mead and ale; his grabs at the wine jug as it was passed round were frequent.

Adelia applied the spur. “Your cousin didn’t confide to you his intention to run away with Mistress Bloat, then?” she asked.

“Of course not.” Master Warin’s voice became sharp. “A lunatic idea. I would have dissuaded him from it. Lord Wolvercote is an important man. I would not have him shamed by one of my family.”

He was lying. Emma had said he’d been part of the elopement conspiracy.

“Did you know him, then? Wolvercote?”

“I did not.” Master Warin’s tongue wriggled around his lips. “We met in church the other night for the first time.”

Lying again. This was her man.

“I’d only wondered if you knew what your cousin was planning, because people are saying that you came here hot on his heels…”

“Who says that?”

“You arrived at the abbey so soon after…”

“That is a calumny. I was worried for my cousin traveling in the snow. Who are these slanderers? Who are you? I don’t need to sit here…” His tongue flickering like a snake’s, Master Waringrabbed his wine cup and moved away to find a seat farther down the table.

Mansur turned his head to watch the lawyer’s agitated progress. “Did he kill the boy?” he asked in Arabic.

“In a way. He told Wolvercote so that Wolvercote could kill him.”

“As guilty, then.”

“As if he shot the bolt himself, yes. He could have said he knew about the elopement and turned up at the abbey in order to stop it, thus explaining why he was so prompt on the scene. But he wouldn’t say that-I gave him the opportunity-because people would think he was in Wolvercote’s pocket, and he insists they never met. Actually, it wouldn’t condemn him if he said they had, but they conspired together to kill the boy, you see, and it’s warping his judgment. Guilt is making him distance himself from Wolvercote when he doesn’t need to.”

“He betrayed his own kin, Allah spit on him. Can we prove it?”

“We’ll try.” Adelia took Allie out of the sling and rubbed her cheek against her daughter’s downy head. How much more depressing was the banal ordinariness of a murderer like little Lawyer Warin than the brutality of a Wolvercote.

There was a sudden push, and she was shoved to one side by Cross taking the place that Warin had left and bringing with him the chill of outside. “Move up there.” The mercenary began reaching for dishes like a starving man.

“What have you been up to?” she asked.

“What you think I been up to? Marching up and down outside that bloody lockup. And a waste of bloody time that was. She’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“The demon. Abbot hisself told me she was a demon. Who’d you think?”

“Dakers? Dakers has gone?” She was on her feet, startling Allie, who’d been sucking the marrow of a beef bone. “Oh, dear God, they’ve taken her.”

Cross looked up at her, gravy dripping from his mouth. “What you on about? Nobody ain’t taken her. She’s vanished. That’s what demons do, they vanish.”

Adelia sat down. “Tell me.”

How it had been done, or even when, Cross couldn’t tell her, because he didn’t know; nobody knew. It hadn’t been discovered until a short while ago when, on instructions from the cellaress, a kitchen servant had brought a tray of Christmas food for its prisoner and Cross had used his key to open the lockup’s door.

“’S on a ring, the key is, see,” he said. “Each guard passes it on to the next one as takes over. Oswald passed it to me when I went on duty, an’ Walt’d passed it to him when he went on duty, and they both swears they never opened that bloody door, an’ I know I didn’t, not til I unlocked it just now…”

There was a pause while he scooped beef into his mouth.

“And?” Adelia asked, impatient.

“An’ so I fits the key in the lock, turns it, opens the door, and the boy goes in with the basket, and there she was…gone. Place as bare as a baby’s arse.”

“Somebody must have let her out.” Adelia was still worried.

“No, they bloody ain’t,” Cross said. “I tell you, nobody din’t open the bloody door til then. She’s vanished. ’S what demons do. Turned herself into a puff a smoke and out through one of the slits, that’s what she done.”

He’d called for Schwyz to come to the lockup, he said, nodding toward the empty space on the upper table where the mercenary leader had been sitting. Sister Havis, too, had been summoned.

“But, like I told ’em, you won’t find her a’cause she’s vanished, gone back to hell where she come from. What else you expect from a demon? Here he comes, look, shittin’ hisself six ways from Sunday.”

A scowling Schwyz had entered the barn and was striding up to the table where the Abbot of Eynsham sat next to the queen. All the diners were too busy carousing and eating to pay him any attention, except those to whom he had to deliver the news. Adelia saw that Eleanor merely raised her eyebrows, but the abbot immediately got to his feet; he seemed to be shouting, though the noise in the barn was too great for Adelia to hear him.

“He’s wanting the abbey searched,” Cross said, interpreting. “No bloody chance of that, though. Nobody ain’t leaving Yule food to go huntin’ a demon in the dark. I ain’t, I know that.”

So much was obvious. The abbot was talking urgently to Lord Wolvercote, who was shrugging him off like a man who didn’t care. Now he was appealing to the abbess, whose response, while more courteous, showed a similar refusal to be of help.

As she spread her hands to indicate the uselessness of interrupting the diners, Mother Edyve’s eyes rested for a moment without expression on Adelia’s across the room.

After all, I have the keys to the lockup.

“What you laughing at?” Cross asked.

“At a man hoist with his own petard.”

However the abbess had managed the escape, whichever of Dakers’s guards had been commanded to turn a blind eye, the Abbot of Eynsham could neither accuse nor punish. He was the one who, in locking her up, had demonized Rosamund’s housekeeper; he could not now complain if, as Cross said, she had done what demons did.

Still grinning, Adelia leaned forward to tell Gyltha, who was on the Arab’s other side, what had happened.

“Good luck to the old gargoyle.” Gyltha took another swig from her beaker; she’d been imbibing with energy for some time.

Mansur said in Arabic, “Convent men have been digging a path through the snow down to the river. The abbess ordered it. I overheard the man Fitchet say it was so that the queen could go skating on the ice. Now I think that they have been making an escapeway for Rosamund’s woman.”

“They’ve let her leave? In this weather?” It wasn’t funny anymore. “I thought they’d hide her somewhere in the abbey.”

Mansur shook his head. “It is too crowded, she would be found. She will survive if Allah wills it. It is not far to Oxford.”

“She won’t go to Oxford.”

There was only one place Dame Dakers would be making for.

For the rest of the meal and as the tables were put aside to clear the barn for dancing, Adelia thought of the river and the woman who would be following its course northward. Would the ice hold her? Could she survive the cold? Had the abbot, who would know where she was heading, sent men and dogs after her?

Mansur, looking at her, said, “Allah protects the insane. He will decide whether the woman lives or dies.”

But it was because Dakers was insane and friendless and knew too much that Adelia’s shoulders were bowed by responsibility for her.

Allah, God, whoever You are, look out for her.

However, in seeing to young Allie, who, having fed and slept and now woken up again, needing to be wiped top and bottom and to have her clouts changed, and demanding entertainment, Adelia was forced to dwell on what was immediate.

There was entertainment in plenty. The troubadours had gathered in the hayloft and were now playing with a force and rhythm that couldn’t be denied; the queen and her court danced to the music with toe-pointing, hand-arching elegance at one end of the barn while, at the other, the English jounced in swinging, noisy rings.

A convent pensioner was juggling apples with a dexterity that belied his years, and the smith, against the advice of his wife, was swallowing a sword.

Activity and grunts from under the hayloft eventually produced a wild assortment of figures that proceeded to put on an impromptu and scatological version of Noah’s flood so exuberantly that the dancers paused to become its audience.

Adelia, sitting on the ground with a crowing, pointing Allie against her knees, found herself enjoying it. It was doubtful if Noah would have recognized the species capering up this invisible gangplank into an invisible ark. The only real animal, the convent donkey, outperformed the rest of the cast by dropping a pungent criticism of their performance on the foot of a unicorn, played by Fitchet, making Gyltha laugh so hard that Mansur had to drag her away until she recovered.

For all their sophistication, Eleanor’s party couldn’t resist the applause accorded to such vulgarism. They joined in, dropping refinement and showing themselves to be clowns manqués as they appeared in startling wigs and skirts, faces painted with flour and madder.

What was it about some men that they must ape women, Adelia thought, even as she booed an irascible Mrs. Noah, played with brio by Montignard, belaboring Noah for being drunk.

Was that Jacques under the warts, straw hair, and extended bosom of Japhet’s wife? Surely that wasn’t the Abbot of Eynsham black-faced and whirling so fast on his toes that his petticoat flared in a blur?

Allie, still clutching her marrow bone, had fallen asleep again. It was time to go to bed before the manic hilarity of the night descended into brawling, as it almost inevitably would. Already Schwyz’s men and Wolvercote’s had separated into drunken coteries and were focusing blearily on one another in a way suggesting that the spirit of Christmas was on its last legs.

Wolvercote himself had already gone, taking Emma with him. The queen was thanking the abbess before departing, and Mother Edyve was signaling to her nuns. Master Warin had disappeared. The smith, clutching his throat, was being led away by his wife.

Adelia looked around for Gyltha and Mansur. Oh, dear, her beloved Arab-possibly the only sober person in the barn apart from herself-had been inveigled into doing his sword dance for the delight of some convent servants, and Gyltha was gyrating round him like an inebriated stoat. Not a drinker usually, Gyltha, but she could never resist alcohol when it was free.

Yawning, Adelia picked up Allie and took her to the corner in which they’d left the cradle, put the child in it, took away the marrow bone, gave it to Ward, covered up her daughter, and raised the cradle’s little leather hood, then settled down beside it to wait.

And fell asleep to dream a frenetic, rowdy dream that turned hideous when a bear picked her up and, clutching her to its pelt, began dragging her away into the forest. She heard growling as Ward attacked the bear and then a yelp as it kicked him away.

Struggling, almost smothered, her legs trailing, Adelia woke up fully. She was being pulled into the darkest corner under the hayloft in the arms of the Abbot of Eynsham. He slammed her so hard against the outer wall that bits of lathe and plaster showered them both, pushing his great body against her.

He was very, very drunk and whispering. “You’re his spy, you bitch. The bishop. I know you…pretending to be prim with me, you whore, I know…what you got up to. How’s he do it? Up the arse? In your mouth?”

Brandy fumes enveloped her as his blackened face came down onto hers.

She jerked her head away and brought up her knee as sharply as she could, but the ridiculous skirt he was wearing gave him protection and, though he grunted, his weight stayed on her.

The whispering went on and on. “…think you’re so clever…see it in your eyes, but you’re a stinking strumpet. A spy. I’m better than Saint Albans… I’m better.…” His hand had found herbreast and was squeezing it. “Look at me, I can do it…Love me, you bitch, love me…” He was licking her face.

Outside the suffocating cubicle she was trapped in, somebody was intervening, trying to pull the heaving, hissing awfulness off her. “Leave her, Rob, she’s not worth it.” It was Schwyz’s voice.

“Yes, she is. She looks at me like I’m shit…like she knows.”

There was the sound of a loud smack, then air and space. Relieved of weight, Adelia slid down the wall, gasping.

The abbot lay on the ground, onto which Mansur had flattened him. He was weeping. Beside him, Schwyz was on his knees, giving comfort like a mother. “Just a whore, Robert, you don’t want that.”

Mansur stood over them both, sucking his knuckles but impassive as ever. He turned and held out his hand to Adelia. She took it and got to her feet.

Together, they walked back to the cradle. Before they reached it, Adelia paused, wiping her face, smoothing her clothes. Even then, she couldn’t look down at her child. How impure they made you feel.

Behind her, Schwyz’s soothing went on, but the wail of the abbot rose high above it. “Why Saint Albans? Why not me?”

With Mansur carrying the cradle, they collected a staggering, singing Gyltha and walked back to the guesthouse through the welcome cold of the night.

Adelia was too deep in shock to be angry, though she knew she would be; after all, she had more regard for herself than women who, miserably, expected assault as the price for being women. But even while her body was shaking, her mind was trying to fathom the reason for what had happened. “I don’t understand,” she said, wailing. “I thought he was a different sort of enemy.”

“Allah punish him, but he would not have hurt you, I think,” Mansur said.

“What are you talking about? He did hurt me. He tried to rape me.”

“He is incapable, I think,” Mansur said. His own condition had made a judge of such things; he found the sexuality of so-called normal men interesting. Though castrated, unable to have children, he himself could still have sex with a woman, and there was lofty pity in his voice for one who could not.

“He seemed capable enough to me.” Sobbing, Adelia stopped and scooped up snow to rub over her face. “Why are you so tolerant?”

“He wants, but he cannot have. I think so. He is a talker, not a doer.”

Was that it? Inadequacy? Among all the filth, there had been a despairing appeal for love, sex, something.

Rowley had said of him, “Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope.”

And with all the cleverness, this friend of popes must, when drunk, plead for a despised woman’s regard like a child for somebody else’s toy.

Because she despised him?

And I do, she thought. If there was vulnerability, it made the abbot the more loathsome to her. Adelia preferred her enemies straightforwardly and wholeheartedly without humanity.

“I hate him,” she said-and now she was angry. “Mansur, I’m going to bring that man down.”

The Arab bent his head. “Let us pray that Allah wills it.”

“He’d better.”

Fury was cleansing to the mind. Nevertheless, as Mansur persuaded Gyltha to stop kissing him and go to sleep, Adelia washed herself all over in a bowl of icy water from the ewer. And felt better.

“I’ll bring him down,” she said again, “somehow.”

For a minute, which was all that could be borne of the cold, she opened one of the shutters to look out on the geometric shadows that the pitches of the abbey’s roofs were throwing onto the stretch of snow beyond its walls.

A blacker runnel scarred the moonlit whiteness where a new track had been dug to the river. They were linked now, the abbey and the Thames. For the first time, there was an escape route from this seething, overfilled cauldron of humanity where paragons and monsters fought the ultimate, yet never-ending, battle in suffocating collision.

At least one soul had taken it. Somewhere in that metallic wilderness, Dakers was risking her life not, Adelia knew, in order to disappear from her captors but to reach the thing she loved, though it was dead.