The Serpent’s Tale

THIRTEEN

The moon had edged a little toward the west, so that two more cloaked mercenaries cast long, sharp, stunted shadows on the ice as they loaded a large sledge with the packages the others were bringing down. One of them picked up Adelia and slung her on top of the bundles, hurting her arms as she landed on them. Somebody else slung a tarpaulin over her, and she had to toss her head round until a fold fell back and she could see.

Go south, she thought. Make them go south, Henry’s there. Lord, make them go south.

The abbot, Schwyz, and some of the other men were clustered around her, balancing against the sides of the sledge as they put on skates, intent, not talking.

They have to go south-they don’t know the king’s attacking Oxford.

Oh, but of course they did. They knew everything-Rowley had inadvertently told them.

Lord, send them south.

The abbot made experimental pirouettes on the ice, admiring his shadow in the steel mirror of the river. “Yes, yes,” he said. “One never forgets.”

He paid no attention to Adelia-she was luggage now. He nodded at Schwyz, who nodded at his men. Two mercenaries picked up trails of harness leading from the sledge and heaved themselves into the straps. Somebody else mounted the sledge’s running board behind Adelia and grasped the guiding struts.

The abbot looked up at the convent walls lowering above him. “Queen Eleanor, sweet broken reed, farewell. Veni, vidi, vadi,” then raised his eyes to the star-sprinkled sky. “Well, well, on to better things. Let us go.”

“And quiet about it,” Schwyz said.

The sledge hissed as it moved.

They headed north.

Adelia retched into her gag. Nothing to stop him from killing her now.

For a while, she was so afraid that she could hardly see. He was going to kill her. Had to kill her.

Appalling sadness overtook her. Images of Allie missing her, growing up without her, small, needy. I’ll die loving you. Know it, little one, I never stopped loving you.

Then the guilt. My fault, darling; a better mother would have passed it by, let them all slaughter one another-no matter, as long as you and I weren’t wrenched apart. My fault, my grievous fault.

On and on, grief and fear, fear and grief, as the untidy, white-edged banks slid by and the sledge whispered and grated and the men pulling it grunted with effort, their breath puffing wisps of smoke into the moonlight, taking her further and further into hell.

Discomfort forced itself on her attention-the bundle beneath her had spears in it. Also, the gag tasted abominable and her arms and wrists hurt.

Suddenly irritable, she shifted, sat up, and began to take notice.

Two mercenaries were pulling the sledge. Another was behind. Four skated on either side, Schwyz and the abbot ahead. Nine in all. None of them her friend Cross-she hadn’t been able to make out the faces of the two mercenaries packing the sledge, but both were thinner than Cross.

No help, then. Wherever they were headed, Schwyz was taking only his most trusted soldiers; he’d abandoned the others.

Where are we going? The Midlands? There was still smoldering discontent against Henry Plantagenet in the Midlands.

Adelia shifted and began investigating the sacking with her wrists, tracing the spears in it along the shafts to their blades.

There.

She pressed down and felt a point prick into her right palm. She began trying to rub the rope against the side of the blade but kept missing it and encountering the spear point instead so that it went uselessly into the rope’s fibers and out again, an exercise that might eventually unpick them if she had a week or two to spare…

It was something to do, though, to fight off the inertia of despair. Of course Eynsham would have her killed. Her use to him as a bargaining counter would last only until he could be sure Henry wasn’t pursuing him-and the chance of that receded with every mile they went north. Most of all, he would kill her because she’d seen the worm wriggling in that brilliant, many-faceted, empty carapace, and he had seen her see it.

Her arms were becoming tired…

Tears still wet on her face, Adelia dozed.

It was heavy going for the men pulling the sledge, and even for those merely skating. Afraid of pursuit, they hadn’t lit torches, and though the moon was bright, the ice gave a deceptive, smooth sheen to branches and other detritus that had been frozen into it so that the mercenaries fell frequently or had to make detours round obstructions-occasionally heaving the sledge over them.

In her sleep, Adelia was vaguely aware of being rolled around during the portages and of muffled swearing, aware, too, that men were taking rests on the sledge, crawling under the tarpaulin with her to get their strength back before giving up their place to the next. There was nothing sexual in it-they were too exhausted-and she refused to wake up. Sleep was oblivion…

Another passenger came aboard, exhaling with the relief at being off the ice. Fingers fumbled at the back of her head and undid the gag. “No need for this now, mistress. Nor this.” Gently, somebody pushed her forward and a knife sawed at the rope round her wrists. “There. More comfy?”

There was a waft of sweet, familiar scent. Licking her mouth, Adelia flexed her shoulders and hands. They hurt. They were still traveling, and it was still very cold, but the stars had dulled a little; the moon shone through a light veil of mist.

“You didn’t need to kill Bertha,” she said.

There was a pause.

“I rather think I did,” Jacques said reasonably. “Her nose would have betrayed me sooner or later. I’m afraid the poor soul literally sniffed me out.”

Yes. Yes, she had.

Bertha crawling forward in the cowshed, snuffling, using the keenest sense she had to try and describe the old woman in the forest who’d given her the mushrooms for Rosamund.

“Smelled purty…like you.”

It wasn’t me, Bertha. It was the man standing behind me. “A him. Not a her.”

The girl had been sniffing the messenger’s scent-the perfume that was a feature of him even when he dressed up as an old woman picking mushrooms.

“Do you mind?” he asked now. It was solicitous, hoping she wasn’t upset. “She wasn’t much of a loss, really, was she?”

Adelia kept her eyes on the two mercenaries dragging the sledge.

Jacques tucked the tarpaulin round her and sat sideways to peer into her face, reasonable, explaining, no longer the wide-eyed young man with big ears, much older, at ease. She supposed that’s what he was, a shape-changer; he could be what he wanted when circumstances demanded.

He’d taken Allie in her cradle and put her on the step.

“Ordinarily, you see, there is no need for what I call auxiliary action, as there was in Bertha’s case,” he said. “Usually, one fulfills one’s contract and moves on. All very tidy. But this particular employment has been complicated-interesting, I don’t deny, but complicated.” He sighed. “Snowed up in a convent, not only with one’s employer but, as it turns out, a witness is not an experience one wants repeated.”

A killer. The killer.

“Yes, I see,” Adelia said.

After all, she’d lived with revulsion ever since she’d become aware that he’d poisoned Rosamund. To use him in the necessary business of getting Wolvercote and Warin to convict themselves in the church had been an exercise in terror, but she’d been unable to think of any other stratagem to placate him. By then she’d sniffed the mind that permeated the abbey with a greater menace than Wolvercote because it was free of limitation, a happy mind. Kill this one, spare that, remain guiltless.

It had been necessary to amuse it, like a wriggling mouse enthralling the cat. To gain time, she’d let it watch her play at solving the one murder of which it was innocent. To keep the cat’s teeth out of the neck of a mouse that asked questions.

She asked, “Did Eynsham order you to kill her?”

“Bertha? Lord, no.” He was indignant. “I do have initiative, you know. Mind you”-an elbow nudged Adelia’s ribs-“he’ll have to pay for her. She’ll go on his account.”

“His account,” she said, nodding.

“Indeed. I am not the abbot’s vassal, mistress. I really must make that clear; I am independent; I travel Christendom providing a service-not everybody approves of it, I know, but it is nevertheless a service.”

“An assassin.”

He considered. “I suppose so. I prefer to think of it as a profession like any other. Let’s face it, Doctor, your own business is termed witchcraft by those who don’t understand it, but we are both professionals pursuing a trade that neither of us can lay public claim to. We both deal in life and death.” But she’d touched his pride. “How did I give myself away? I did try to warn you against too much curiosity.”

His visits to Bertha, his constant proximity, the indefinable sense of menace that lurked in the cowshed when he was there. The scent that Bertha had recognized. A freedom to roam the abbey, unnoticed, that no one else possessed. In the end, he was the only one it could have been.

“The Christmas feast,” she said.

She’d known for sure then. In the capering, warty old woman of Noah’s ark, she’d recognized a grotesque of the crone that Bertha had seen in the forest.

“Ah,” he said. “I really should avoid dressing up, shouldn’t I? I have a weakness for it, I’m afraid.”

She asked, “When did Eynsham hire you to kill Rosamund?”

“Oh, ages ago,” he said. “I’d only recently come to England to pick up commissions. Well, I’ll tell you when it was; I’d just become the bishop’s messenger-in my line of work, it’s always useful to have a reason to travel the countryside. Incidentally, mistress, I hope I gave the bishop good service…” He was in earnest. “I like to think I’m an excellent servant, no matter what the work.”

Yes, excellent. When Rowley had crept into the abbey and alerted his men, it hadn’t occurred to him that his messenger should not be informed of the coming attack along with the rest-not the irritating, willing Jacques, one of his own people.

“In fact, I shall miss working for Saint Albans,” he was saying now, “but as soon as Walt told me the king was coming, I had to inform Eynsham. I couldn’t let Master Abbot be taken, could I? He owes me money.”

“Is that how it goes?” she asked. “The word is spread? Assassin for hire?”

“Virtually, yes. I haven’t lacked employment so far. The contractor never likes to reveal himself, of course, but do you know how I found out this one was our abbot?”

The joy of it raised his voice, launching an owl off its tree and making Schwyz, up ahead, turn and swear at him. “Do you know how I recognized him? Guess.”

She shook her head.

“His boots. Master Abbot wears exceptionally fine boots, as I do. Oh, yes, and he addressed his servant as ‘my son,’ and I said to myself,

By the saints, here is a churchman, a rich churchman. All I had to do was ask around Oxford’s best bootmakers. The problem, you see, is to get the other half of the fee, isn’t it?” He was sharing their occupational troubles. “So much as down payment, so much when the job’s done. They never like to pay the second installment, don’t you find that?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Well, I do. Getting the other half of the fee is why I’ve had to attach myself to my lord Eynsham like fish glue. Actually, in this instance, it isn’t his fault; circumstances have been against him: the retreat from Wormhold, the snow…but apparently we’re calling in at his abbey on the way north-that’s where he keeps the gold, in his abbey.”

“He’ll kill you,” she said. It was an observation to keep him talking; she didn’t mind one way or the other. “He’ll get Schwyz to cut your throat.”

“Aren’t they an interesting couple? Doesn’t Schwyz adore him? They met in the Alps, apparently. I have wondered whether they were…well, you know…but I think not, don’t you? I’d welcome your medical opinion…”

One of the mercenaries in harness was slowing down, wheeling his arm for the messenger to take his place.

The voice in Adelia’s ear became a confidential whisper, changing from a gossip’s to an assassin’s. “Don’t worry for me, mistress. Our abbot has too many enemies that need to be silenced in silence. Schwyz leaves a butcher’s trail behind. I don’t. No, no, my services will always be in demand. Worry for yourself.”

He threw back the tarpaulin in order to get off the sledge.

“Will it be you who kills me, Jacques?” she asked.

“I do hope not, mistress,” he said politely. “That would be a shame.”

And he was gone, refusing to take his place in the harness. “My good fellow, I am not an ox.”

Not human, either, she thought, a lusus naturae, a tool, no more culpable for what it did than an artifact, as blameless as a weapon stuck on a wall and admired by the owner for its beautiful functionality.

The lingering trail of his perfume was obliterated by a smell of sweat and damp dirt from the next man who crawled under the tarpaulin to fall asleep and snore.

The abbot had taken position on the step behind her, but instead of helping to propel the sledge along, he became a passenger, his weight slowing the men pulling it to a stumping crawl that threatened their balance. They were complaining. At an order from Schwyz, they removed their skates and, to give them better purchase, continued in their boots.

Which, Adelia saw, were splashing. The sledge had begun to send up spray as it traveled. There were no stars now, and the vague moon had an even more vague penumbra. Schwyz had lit a torch and was holding it high as he skated.

It was thawing.

From over her head came a fruity boom: “I don’t wish to complain, my dear Schwyz, but any more of this and we’ll be marching on the river bottom. How much further?”

“Not far now.”

Not far to where? Having been asleep and not knowing for how long, she couldn’t estimate how far they’d come. The banks were still their featureless, untidy conglomeration of reed and snow.

It was even colder now; the chill of increasing damp had something to do with it, but so had fear. Eynsham would be reassured by their unpursued and uninterrupted passage up the river. Once he was in safe territory, he could rid himself of the burden he’d carried to it.

“Up ahead,” Schwyz called.

There was nothing up ahead except a dim twinkle in the eastern sky like a lone star bright enough to penetrate the mist that hid the others. A castle showing only one light? A turret?

Now they were approaching a landing stage, white edged and familiar.

Then she knew.

Rosamund had been waiting for her.

A delia had remembered Wormhold as a place of jagged, shocking flashes of color where men and women walked and talked in madness.

Now, through the dawn mist, the tower returned to what it was-a mausoleum. Architectural innuendo had gone. And the maze, for those who dragged the sledge through slush into it, was merely a straight and dreary tunnel of gray bushes leading to a monument like a giant’s tombstone against a drearier sky.

The door above its steps stood open, sagging now. The unlit bonfire remained untouched in the hall where a mound of broken furniture, like the walls, shone with gathering damp in Schwyz’s torchlight.

As they went in, a scuttle from escaping rats accentuated the hall’s silence, as did the abbot’s attempt to raise the housekeeper. “Dakers. Where are you, little dear? ’Tis your old friend come to call. Robert of Eynsham.”

He turned to Schwyz as the echo faded. “She doesn’t know it was me as had her locked up, does she?”

Schwyz shook his head. “We fooled her, Rob.”

“Good, then I’m still her ally. Where is the old crow? We need our dinner. Dakers.”

Schwyz said, “We can’t stay long, Rob. That bastard’ll be after us.”

“My dear, stop attributing the powers of Darkness to him, we’ve outmaneuvered the bugger.” He grimaced. “I suppose I’d better go up and search for my letters. If our Fair Rosamund kept one, she might have kept others. I told the fat bitch to burn them, but did she? Women are so unreliable.” He pointed at the bonfire. “Get that alight when the time comes. Some food first, I think, a nap, and then, when our amiable king arrives, we’ll be long gone, leaving a nice warm fire to greet him. Dakers.”

He must know where she is, Adelia thought. The only life here is in the top room with the dead.

“Up you go, then.” Schwyz turned away to give orders to his men, and then turned back. “What do you want done with the trollop?”

“This trollop?” The abbot looked down at Adelia. “We’ll hang on to her until the last minute, I think, just in case. She can come up and help me look for the letters.”

“Why? She’ll be better down here.” Schwyz was jealous.

The abbot was patient with him. “Because I didn’t see any letters lying around when we were here last, but little Mistress Big Eyes had one, hadn’t you, my dear? If she found one, she can find the others. Bind her hands, if you like, but in front this time and not too tight; she’s looking wan.”

Adelia’s hands were pinioned again-not gently, either.

“Up, up.” The abbot pointed her toward the stairs. “Up, up, up.” To the mercenary, he said, “Tell the men to put their minds to my dinner. And Schwyz…” The tone had changed.

“What?”

“Set a damn good watch on that river.”

He’s frightened, Adelia thought suddenly. He, too, credits Henry with supernatural powers. Oh, dear God, let him be right.

Going up the tiny, wedge-shaped, slippery, winding steps without the balancing use of hands was not easy, but Adelia did better than the abbot, who was grunting with effort before they reached the second landing. That was the stage where the tower cut them off from the noise at its base, imposing a silence in which the echo of their footsteps troubled the ears as if they disobeyed an ordinance from the dead. Go back. This is a tomb.

Light that was hardly light at all came, sluggish, through the arrow slits onto the same broken mess that had littered the landings when she’d climbed up here with Rowley. Nobody had swept it away, nobody ever would.

Up and up, past Rosamund’s apartments, empty of their carpets and gold ornaments now, looted by mercenaries, maybe even the Aquitanians, while Eleanor had kept her vigil over a corpse. Much good it had done them; loot and looters had gone to the bottom of the Thames.

They were getting close to the top now.

I don’t want to go in there. Why doesn’t it stop? It’s impossible I should die here. Why doesn’t somebody stop this?

The last landing, the door a crack open but with its ornate key in the lock.

Adelia stood back. “I’m not going in.”

Gripping her shoulder, the abbot pushed her in front of him. “Dakers, my dame. Here’s the Abbot of Eynsham, your old friend, come to pay his respects to your mistress.”

A smell like a blast of wind teetered him on the threshold.

The room was furnished as Adelia had last seen it. No looting here-there hadn’t been time.

Rosamund no longer sat at the writing table, but something lay on the bed with the frail curtains framing it and a cloak covering its upper half.

There was no sign of Dakers, but, if she had wanted to preserve her mistress still, she had made the mistake of closing the windows and lighting funerary candles.

“Dear God.” With a handkerchief to his nose, the abbot hurried around the room, blowing out candles and opening the windows. “Dear God, the whore stinks. Dear God.”

Moist, gray air refreshed the chamber slightly.

Eynsham came back to the bed, his eyes fascinated.

“Leave her,” Adelia advised him.

He whipped the cloak off the body and let it fall to the floor.

“Aach.”

Her lovely hair fanned out from the decomposing face onto a pillow, with another pillow propping her crown near the top of her head. The crossed hands on her breast were mercifully hidden by a prayer book. Feet bulged wetly out of the tiny gold slippers that peeped from under the graceful, carefully arranged folds of a gown as blue as a spring sky. Patches of ooze were staining its silk.

“My, my,” said the abbot, softly. “Sic transit Rosa Mundi. So the rose of all the world rots like any other…Rosamund the Foul…”

“Don’t you dare,” Adelia shouted at him. If she’d had her hands free, she’d have hit him. “Don’t you dare mock her. You brought her to this, and, by God, this is what you’ll come to-your soul with it.”

“Oof.” He stepped back like a child faced by a furious parent. “Well, it’s a horror…admit it’s a horror.”

“I don’t care. You treat her with respect.”

For a moment he was wrong-footed by his own lapse in taste. Tentatively, standing well back from the bed, his hand traced a blessing in the air toward it. “Requiescat in pace.” After a moment, he said, “What is that white stuff growing out of her face?”

“Grave wax,” Adelia told him. Actually, it was very interesting; she’d not seen it on a human flesh before, only on that of a sow at the death farm.

For a moment she was a mistress in the art of death again, aware only of the phenomenon in front of her, vaguely irritated that lack of time and means were preventing her from examining it.

It’s because she was fat, she thought. The sow in Salerno had been fat, and Gordinus had kept it in an airtight tin chest away from flies. “You see, my child? Bereft of insects, this white grease-I call it corpus adipatus-will accrete on plumper areas, cheeks, breasts, buttocks, et cetera, and hold back putrefaction, yes, actually delay it. Though whether it causes the delay or the delay causes it is yet to be determined.”

Bless him, Gordinus had called it a marvel, which it was, and damn it that she was seeing it manifest on a human corpse only now.

It was especially interesting that the room’s new warmth was, to judge from what was seeping through Rosamund’s gown, bringing on putrefaction at the selfsame time. That couldn’t be caused by flies-could it?-there were none at this time of year…blast it, if her hands were free, she could find out what was breeding under the material…

“Oh, what?” she asked, crossly. The abbot was pulling at her.

“Where does she keep the letters?”

“What letters?” This opportunity to advance knowledge might never come again. If it wasn’t flies…

He swung her round to face him. “Let me explain the position to you, my dear. In all this I have only been pursuing my Christian duty to bring down a king who had the good Saint Thomas murdered on the steps of his own cathedral. I intended a civil war that our gracious queen would win. Since that outcome now seems unlikely, I need to retrieve my position because, if Henry finds my letters, Henry will send them to the Pope. And will the Holy Father sanction what I have done to punish the wicked? Will he say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful Robert of Eynsham, you have advanced our great cause’? He will not. He must pretend outrage, because a worthless whore was poisoned in the process. He will wash his Pilate’s hands. Will there be oak leaves? Reward? Ah, no.”

He stopped savoring the sound of his own voice. “Find those letters for me, mistress, or when Henry comes he will discover in the ashes of his bordello the bones of not just one of his harlots but two.” He was diverted by a happy thought. “Together, in each other’s arms, perhaps. Yes, perhaps…”

He mustn’t see that she was afraid; he mustn’t see that she was afraid. “In that case, the letters will be burned, too,” she said.

“Not if the bitch kept them in a metal box. Where are they? You had one, mistress, and were quick enough to show it around.

Where did she keep the letters?”

“On the table, I took it from the table.”

“If she kept one, she kept more.” He shouted for the housekeeper again. “Dakers. She’ll know. Where is the hellhag?”

And then Adelia knew where Dakers was.

All the visits he’d made to this room, and he’d never known he was observed from a garderobe with a spy hole. He didn’t know now.

Eynsham was examining the table, sweeping its writing implements aside, sending the ancient bowl in which Rosamund had kept sweetmeats onto the floor, where it broke. He bent to look under the table. There was a grunt of satisfaction. He came up holding a crumpled piece of vellum. “Is this all there was?”

“How could I know?” It was the letter Rosamund had been writing to the queen, that Eleanor in her fury had thrown to the floor. Adelia had given the abbot’s template to poor Father Paton and, if she died for it, she wasn’t going to tell this man that there were others hidden in a box stool only inches from his right boot.

Let him doubt, let there be a worm of worry for as long as he lives.

Great God, he’s reading it.

The abbot had lumbered to the open window and was holding the parchment to the light. “Such an appalling hand the trollop had,” he said. “Still, it’s amazing she could write at all.”

And let Dakers doubt him. No wonder the housekeeper had laughed as they were taken to the boats that night; she’d seen Eynsham, who had always been Rosamund’s friend and, therefore, would be a friend to her.

If she was listening now, if she could be got to switch sides…

Adelia raised her voice. “Why did you make Rosamund write letters to Eleanor?”

The abbot lowered the parchment, partly exasperated, partly amused. “Listen to the creature. Why does she ask a question when her brain cannot possibly encompass the answer? What use to tell you? How can you even approach in understanding the exigencies that we, God’s agents, are put to in order to keep His world on its course, the descent we must make into the scum, the instruments we must use-harlots like that one on the bed, cutthroats, all the sweepings of the cesspit, to achieve a sacred aim.”

He was telling her anyway. A wordy man. A man needing the reassurance of his own voice and, even more, the sanctification of what he had done.

And still hopeful. It surprised her. That he was having to abandon his great game as a lost cause and desert his championship of Eleanor was stimulating him, as if certain he could retrieve the situation with charm, tactics, a murder here or there, using the false urbanity, his common-man-with-learning, all the air in the balloon that had bounced him into the halls of popes and royalty…

A mountebank, really, Adelia thought.

Also a virgin. Mansur had seen it, told her, but Mansur, with the superiority of a man who could hold an erection, had discounted the agony of supposed failure turned to malevolence. Another churchman might bless a condition that ensured his chastity, but not this one; he wanted, lusted after, that most natural and commonplace gift that he was denied.

Perhaps he was making the world pay for it, meddling with brilliance in high politics, pushing men and women round his chess board, discarding this one, moving that one, compensating himself for the appalling curiosity that kept him outside their Garden of Eden as he jumped up and down in an effort to see inside it.

“To stimulate war, my dear,” he was saying. “Can you understand that? Of course you can’t-you are the clay from which you were made and the clay to which you will return. A war to cleanse the land of a barbarous and unclean king. To avenge poor Becket. To return England to God’s writ.”

“Rosamund’s letters would do all that?” she asked.

He looked up. “Yes, as a matter of fact. A wronged and vengeful woman, and believe me, nobody is more vengeful than our gracious Eleanor, will escape any bonds, climb any mountains, cross all oceans to wreak havoc on the wrongdoer. And thus she did.”

“Then why did you have Rosamund poisoned?”

“Who says I did?” Very sharp.

“Your assassin.”

“The merry Jacques has been chattering, has he? I must set Schwyz onto that young man.”

“People will think the queen did it.”

“The king does, as was intended,” he said vaguely. “Barbarians, my dear, are easily manipulated.” He turned back to the letter and continued to read. “Excellent, oh excellent,” he said. “I’d forgotten…To the ‘supposed Queen of England…from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.’ What I had to endure to persuade that tedious wench to this…Robert, Robert, such a subtle fellow you are…”

A draft twitched at Adelia’s cloak. The hanging behind Rosamund’s bed had lifted. As air came up the corbel of the hidden garderobe and into the room, it brought a different, a commoner stench to counter that of the poor corpse on the bed. It was cut off as the hanging dropped back.

Adelia walked across to the window. The abbot was still holding the letter to the light, reading it. She took up a position where, if he looked up, he would see her and not the figure creeping down the side of the bed. It had no knife in its hand, but it was still death-this time, its own.

Dakers was dying; Adelia had seen that yellowish skin and receded eyes too often not to know what they meant. The fact that the woman was walking at all was a miracle, but she was. And silently.

Help me, Adelia willed her. Do something. Without moving, she used her eyes in appeal. Help me.

But Dakers didn’t look at her, nor at the abbot. All her energy was bent on reaching the staircase.

Adelia watched the woman slip between the partially open door and its frame without touching either and disappear. She felt a tearing resentment. You could have hit him with something.

The abbot had sat himself in Rosamund’s chair as he read, still muttering bits of the letter out loud. “‘…and I did please the king in bed as you never did, so he told me…’ I’ll wager you did, girl. Sucking and licking, I’ll wager you did. ‘…he did moan with delight…’ I’ll wager he did, you filthy trollop…”

He’s exciting himself with his own words.

As Adelia thought it, he glanced up-into her eyes. His face gorged. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” she told him. “I am looking at you and seeing nothing.”

Schwyz was calling from the stairs, but his voice was drowned in Eynsham’s scream: “You judge me? You, a whore…judge me?”

He got up, a gigantic wave rising, and engulfed her. He clutched her to his chest and carried her so that her feet trailed between his knees. Blinded, she thought he was going to drop her out of the window, but he turned her round, holding her high by the scruff of the neck and her belt. For a second, she glimpsed the bed, heard the grunt as she was thrown down onto what lay on it.

As Adelia’s body landed on the corpse, its belly expelled its gases with a whistle.

The abbot was screaming. “Kiss her. Kiss, kiss, kiss…suck, lick, you bitches.” He pushed her face into Rosamund’s. He was twisting Adelia’s head like a piece of fruit, pressing it down into the grease. “Sniff, suck, lick…”

She was suffocating in decomposing flesh.

“Rob. Rob.”

The pressure on her head lessened slightly, and she managed to turn her smeared face sideways and breathe.

“Rob. Rob. There’s a horse in the stable.”

It stopped. It had stopped.

“No rider,” Schwyz said. “Can’t find a rider, but there’s somebody here.”

“What sort of horse?”

“Destrier. A good one.”

“Is it his? He can’t be here. Jesus save us, is he here?”

The slam of the door cut off their voices.

Adelia rolled off the bed and groped her way across the floor to one of the windows, her tied hands searching outside the sill for its remnant of snow. She found some and shoved it into her mouth. Another window, more snow into the mouth, scrubbing her teeth with it, spitting. More, for the face, nostrils, eyes, hair.

She went from window to window. There wasn’t enough snow in the world, not enough clean, numbing ice…

Drenched, shaking, she slumped into Rosamund’s chair, and with her pinioned hands still scrubbing at her neck, she laid her head on the table and gave herself up to heaving, gasping sobs. Uninhibited, like a baby, she wept for herself, for Rosamund, Eleanor, Emma, Allie, all women everywhere and what was done to them.

“What are you bawling for?” a male voice said, aggrieved. “You think that’s bad? Try spending time cooped up in a shithole with Dakers for company.”

A knife ripped the rope away from round her hands. A handkerchief was pushed against her cheek. It smelled of horse liniment. It smelled beautiful.

With infinite care, she turned her head so that her cheek rested on the handkerchief and she could squint at him.

“Have you been in there all the time?” she asked.

“All the time,” the king told her.

Still with her head on the table, she watched him walk over to the bed, pick up his cloak, and replace it carefully over the corpse. He went to the door to try its latch. It didn’t move. He bent down to peer through the keyhole.

“Locked,” he said, as if it was a comfort.

The ruler of an empire that stretched from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees was in worn hunting leathers-she’d never seen him in anything else; few people did. He walked with the rolling bandiness of a man who spent more time in the saddle than out of it. Not tall, not handsome, nothing to distinguish him except an energy that drew the eye. When Henry Plantagenet was in the room, nobody looked anywhere else.

Deeper lines ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth than had when she’d last seen him, there was a new dullness in his eyes, and his red hair was dimmer; something had gone out of him and not been replaced.

Relief brought a manic tendency to giggle. Adelia began rubbing her wrists. “Where are your men, my lord?”

“Ah, well there…” Grimacing, he came back from the door and edged round the table to peer cautiously out. “They’re on their way, only a few, mind, but picked men, fine men. I had a look at the situation in Oxford and left young Geoffrey to take it before he moves on to Godstow.”

“But…did Rowley find you? You know the queen is at Godstow?”

“That’s why Geoffrey’ll take it next,” he said irritably. “He won’t have any trouble in either place. The rebels, God rot ’em, I’ll eat them alive, were practically running up the white flag at Oxford already, so…”

“My daughter’s at Godstow,” she said. “My people…”

“I know, Rowley told me. Geoffrey knows, I told him. Stop wittering. I’ve seen snowmen with more defensive acumen than Wolvercote. Leave it to young Geoffrey.”

She supposed she’d have to.

He glanced round. “How is little Rowley-Powley, anyway? Got a tooth yet? Showing a flair for medicine?”

“She’s well.” He could always melt her. But it would be nice to get out of here. “These picked men of yours…” she said. This was Rowley all over again. Why didn’t they ever bring massed troops?

“They’re on their way,” he said, “but I fear I outstripped them.” He turned back to the window. “They’d told me she still wasn’t buried, you see. My lads are bringing a coffin with them. Buggers couldn’t keep up.”

They wouldn’t have; he must have ridden like a fiend, melting the snow in front of him, to say good-bye, to mend the indecency inflicted on his woman.

“Hadn’t long arrived before you turned up,” he said. “Heard you coming up the stairs, so Dakers and I beat a retreat. First rule when one’s outnumbered-learn the enemy’s strength.”

And learn that Rosamund, in her stupidity and ambition, had betrayed him. Like his wife, like his eldest son.

Adelia felt an awful pity. “The letters, my lord…I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t mention it.” He wasn’t being polite; she mustn’t refer to it again. Since he’d covered the corpse, he hadn’t looked at it.

“So here we are,” he said. Still cautious, he leaned out. “They’re not keeping much of a watch, I must say. There’s only a couple of men patrolling the courtyard-what in hell are the rest doing?”

“They’re going to fire the tower,” she told him, “and us in it.”

“If they’re using the wood in the hall, they’ll have a job. Wouldn’t light pussy.” He leaned farther out of the window and sniffed. “They’re in the kitchen, that’s where they are…something’s cooking. Hell’s bollocks, the incompetent bastards are taking the time to eat.” He loathed inefficiency, even in his enemies.

“I don’t blame them.” She was hungry, she was ravenous. A magic king had skewed this death chamber into something bearable. Without sympathy, without concession to her as a woman, by treating her as a comrade, he had restored her. “Have you got any food on you?”

He struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Well, there, and I left the festive meats behind. No, I haven’t. At least, I don’t think so…” He had a pocket inside his jacket and he emptiedits contents onto the table with one hand, his eyes still on the courtyard.

There was string, a bradawl, some withered acorns, needle and twine in a surprisingly feminine sewing case, a slate book and chalk, and a small square of cheese, all of them covered in oats for his horse.

Adelia picked out the cheese and wiped it. It was like chewing resin.

Now that she was more composed, events were connecting to one another. This king, this violent king, this man who, intentionally or not, had set on the knights that stirred Archbishop Becket’s brains onto the floor of his cathedral, had sat quietly behind a hanging and listened, without sound, without moving, to treachery of extreme magnitude. And he’d been armed.

“Why didn’t you come out and kill him?” she asked, not because she wished he had but because she truly wanted to know how he’d restrained himself from it.

“Who? Eynsham? Friend to the Pope? Legate maleficus? Thank you, he’ll die, but not at my hand. I’ve learned my lesson.”

He’d given Canterbury to Becket out of trust, because he loved him-and from that day his reforms had been opposed at every turn. The murder of the Jew-hating, venomous, now-sainted archbishop had set all Christendom against him. He’d done penance for it everywhere, allowing the monks of Canterbury to whip him in public, only just preventing his country from being placed under the Pope’s interdict banning marriage, baptism, burial of the dead…

Yes, he could control his anger now. Eleanor, Young Henry, even Eynsham, were safe from execution.

Adelia thought how strange it was that, locked in a chamber with a man as helpless as herself, at the top of a tower that any minute could be a burning chimney, she should be at ease.

He wasn’t, though; he was hammering the mullion. “Where are they, in God’s name? Jesus, if I can get here fast, why can’t they?”

Because you outstripped them, Adelia thought. In your impatience, you outstrip everybody, your wife, your son, Becket, and expect them to love you. They are people of our time and you are not; you see beyond the boundaries they set; you see me for what I am and use me for your advantage; you see Jews, women, even heretics, as human beings and use them for your advantage; you envisage justice, toleration, unattainable things. Of course nobody keeps up with you.

Oddly enough, the one mind she could equate with his was Mother Edyve’s. The world believed that what was now was permanent, God had willed it, there could be no alteration without offending Him.

Only a very old woman and this turbulent man had the sacrilegious impudence to question the status quo and believe that things could and should be changed for the betterment of all people.

“Come on, then,” he said, “we’ve got time. Tell me. You’re my investigator-what did you find out?”

“You don’t pay me for being your investigator.” She might as well point this out while she had the advantage.

“Don’t I? I thought I did. Take it up with the Exchequer. Get on, get on.” His stubby fingers drummed on the window sill. “Tell me.”

So she told him, from the beginning.

He wasn’t interested in the death of Talbot of Kidlington. “Silly bugger. I suppose it was the cousin, was it? Never trust the man who handles your money…Wolvercote? Vicious, that family. All rebels. My mother hanged the father from Godstow Bridge, and I’ll do the same for the son. Go on, go on, get to the bits that matter.”

He meant Rosamund’s death, but it all mattered to Adelia, and she wasn’t going to let him off any of it. She’d been clever, she’d been brave, it had cost too many lives; he was going to know everything. After all, he was getting it free.

She plowed on, occasionally nibbling at the cheese. Drops from melting icicles splashed on the sill. The king watched the courtyard. The body of the woman who’d begun it all lay on her bed and rotted.

He interrupted. “Who’s that…Saints’ bollocks, he’s stealing my horse. I’ll rip him, I’ll mince his tripes, I’ll…”

Adelia got up to see who was stealing the king’s destrier.

A thickening mist hid the hill and gave an indistinct quality to the courtyard below, but the figure urging the horse into a gallop toward the maze entrance was recognizable, though he was bending low over its neck.

Adelia gave a yelp. “Not him, not him. He mustn’t get away. Stop him, for God’s sake, stop him.”

But there was nobody to stop him; some of Schwyz’s men had heard the hooves and were running toward the maze, uselessly.

“Who was it?” the king asked.

“The assassin,” she told him. “Dear God, he mustn’t get away. I want him punished.” For Rosamund, for Bertha…

Something had happened to frighten him if Jacques was deserting Eynsham and the second installment of his precious payment.

Then she was pulling at the king’s sleeve. “It’s your men,” she said. “He must have heard them. They’re here. Shout to them. Tell them to go after him. Will they catch him?”

“They’d better,” he said. “That’s a bloody good horse.”

But if Henry’s men had arrived and the assassin had heard them and decided to cut his losses, there was no sign of them in the courtyard and no sound.

Together, Adelia and the king watched the pursuers return, shrugging, to disappear toward the kitchen.

“Are you certain your men are on their way?” she asked.

“We won’t see them til they’re ready. They’ll be coming through the rear of the maze.”

“There’s another entrance?”

The king smirked. “Imitate the mole, never leave yourself only one exit. Get on with it, tell me the rest.”

Jacques’s escape anguished her. She thought of the little unmarked grave in the nuns’ cemetery…

The king’s fingers were tapping again, so she took up her tale where she’d left off.

There was another interruption. “Hello, where’s Dakers going?”

Adelia was beside him in an instant. The mist had begun to play tricks, ebbing and flowing in swirls that deceived the eye into seeing unmelted mounds of snow as crouching men and animals, but it didn’t hide the thin black figure of Rosamund’s housekeeper crawling toward the maze.

“What’s that she’s dragging?”

“God knows,” the king said. “A sawing horse?”

It was something large and angular, too much for the human bundle of bones that collapsed after each pull but which managed to steady itself to pull again.

“She’s mad, of course,” the king said. “Always was.”

It was agonizing to watch such effort, but watch they did, having to keep refocusing their eyes as Dakers inched her burden along like an ant through the shifting grayness.

Leave it, whatever it is, Adelia begged her. They haven’t seen you. Go and die at your own choosing.

Another blink and there was only fog.

“So…” the king said. “You’d taken one of Eynsham’s templates from this chamber to Godstow and given it to the priest… Go on.”

“His handwriting is distinctive, you see,” she told him. “I’ve never seen another like it, very curly-beautiful, really-he uses classically square capitals but fills them in with whirls and his minuscule…”

Henry sighed, and Adelia hurried on. “Anyway, Sister Lancelyne, she’s Godstow’s librarian, once wrote to Eynsham asking if she might borrow the abbot’s copy of Boethius’s Consolation in order to copy it, and he’d written back, refusing…”

She saw again the learned little old nun among her empty shelves. “If ever we get out of here, I’d like Sister Lancelyne to have it.”

“A whole Philosophy? Eynsham has a Boethius?” The Plantagenet eyes gleamed; he was greedy for books and totally untrustworthy when it came to other people’s.

“I should like,” Adelia said clearly, “Sister Lancelyne to have it.”

“Oh, very well. She’d better look after it. Get on, get on.”

“And while we’re about it”-there had to be some profit out of this-“if Emma Bloat should be widowed…”

“She will be,” the king promised. “Oh, yes, she will be.”

“She’s not to be forced into marriage again.”

With her own fortune and Wolvercote’s lands, Emma would be a prize. She would also, as the widow of one of his barons, be in the king’s gift, a valuable tradeable object in the royal marketplace.

“Is this a horse fair?” the king asked. “Are you haggling? With me?”

“Negotiating. Regard it as my fee.”

“You’ll ruin me,” he said. “Very well. Can we proceed? I need evidence of Eynsham’s calumny to show the Pope, and I doubt he’ll regard curly handwriting as proof.”

“Father Paton thought it was.” Adelia winced. “Poor Father Paton.”

“Anyway…” Henry was looking around the table. “The bastard seems to have taken his template with him.”

“There are others. What we can’t prove is that he employed an assassin to kill…who did kill.”

“I shouldn’t worry about that,” the king said. “He’ll probably tell us.”

I’ve condemned a man to torture, she thought. Suddenly, she was tired and didn’t want to say any more. If Schwyz managed to put a flame to the bonfire in the hall, there was no point to it, anyway.

She abridged what was left. “Then Rowley arrived. He told Walt, that’s his groom, to look after me when the attack came. Walt, not knowing, told the assassin, who told Eynsham-who is very afraid of you and decided to run and take me with him.” It sounded like the house that Jack built. That’s all,” she said, closing her eyes, “more or less.”

Drips from the icicles were increasing, pattering like rain onto the windowsills of a silent room.

“Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar,” the king said, musing.

It was an accolade. She opened her eyes, tried to smile at him, and closed them again.

“He’s a good lad, young Geoffrey,” Henry said. “Very loving. God bless him. I got him on a prostitute, Ykenai-strange name, the saints only know what race her parents were, because she doesn’t. Big woman, comfortable. I still see her occasionally when I’m in London.”

Adelia was awake now. He was telling her something, a tit for tat, payment for her trouble. This was about Rosamund without mentioning her name.

“I set her up in a pie shop, Ykenai, and very successful it’s been, except it’s making her bigger than ever. We talk about pies, there’s a lot to making pies.”

Big women, comfortable, bouncy mattresses, as Rosamund had been. Women who talked about little things, who didn’t test him. Women as different from Eleanor as chalk to cheese-and maybe he’d loved both.

Wife and mistress both treacherous. Whether Rosamund had been ambitious herself or had been stirred into it by a devious abbot, the result was the same; she had nearly sparked a war. The only female refuge this man, this emperor, had left lived in a London pie shop where at least one loyal son had been born to him.

Henry’s voice came from the window, nastily. “While he was with you, did the Bishop of Saint Albans tell you of his oath?” He wanted to hurt someone else who’d been betrayed.

“Yes,” she said.

“He swore it in front of me, you know. Hand on the Bible, ‘I swear by the Lord God and all the saints of Heaven that if You will guard her and keep her safe, I shall withhold myself from her.’”

“I know,” she said.

“Hah.”

For the first time in days, she could hear the chatter of birds, as if small, frozen hearts were being thawed back to life.

Henry reached over and took the remnant of cheese out of her fingers, squashed it, and scattered the crumbs along the windowsill.

A robin flew down immediately to peck, its wings almost touching his hand before flying off again.

“I’ll bring spring back to England,” its king said. “They won’t beat me, by Christ, they won’t.”

They have beaten you, Adelia thought. Your men aren’t coming. Everybody betrays you.

Henry’s head had gone up. “Hear that?”

“No.”

“I did. They’re here.” His sword rasped from its scabbard. “Let’s go down and fight the bastards.”

They weren’t here. It was birds he’d heard. The two of them would stay here forever and decompose alongside Rosamund.

She dragged herself to the window.

Alarmed men were emerging from the kitchen, turning this way and that, confused by the fog, running back to fetch weapons. She heard Schwyz’s shout: “Round the other side. It came from the rear.”

The Abbot of Eynsham was taking undecided steps toward the entrance to the maze, then away from it.

“Yes,” Adelia said.

Henry’s dagger that had cut her hands free was on the table. She took it up with a ferocious joy. She wanted to fight somebody.

But she couldn’t. For one thing…“My lord, we’re locked in.”

He was standing on tiptoe, feeling around the top of the coronal that held the curtains of Rosamund’s bed. His hand came away with a key in it. He waved it at her. “Never get into a hole without a second exit.”

Then they were out of the door and pattering down the stairs, Henry leading.

Two landings down, they met one of Schwyz’s men running up, sword drawn. Whether he was trying to find somewhere to hide or had come for her, Adelia never knew. His eyes widened as he saw the king.

“Wrong way,” Henry told him, and stuck him through the mouth. The man fell. The king ran him through again, raising him on the swordpoint as if on a skewer, and flicked him off so that he was thrown round the next bend. Kept flicking him, a heavy man, round the next and the next, though he was long dead by the time they reached the hall.

The air outside was discordant with shouts and the clash of metal. The fog had thickened; it was difficult to make out who was fighting whom.

The king disappeared, and Adelia heard a gleeful howl of “Dieu et Plantagenet” as he found an enemy.

It was like being in the middle of battling unseen ghosts. With the dagger ready, she began walking cautiously forward to where she’d last seen Eynsham. One killer had escaped; she’d be damned if another thwarted justice. This one would if he could; not a courageous man, the abbot; he killed only through others.

Two heavy figures appeared on her left, their swords sparking as they fought. She jumped out of their way and they vanished again.

If I call him, he will come, she thought. She was still a bargaining counter; he’d want to use her as a shield. She had a knife, she could threaten him into standing still. “Abbot.” Her voice was high and thin. “Abbot.”

Something answered her in a voice even higher. In astonishment. In a crescendo of agony that rose into a falsetto beyond what was human. In shrieks that pulsed through the mist and overrode all noise of battle and silenced it. It overrode everything.

It was coming from the direction of the maze. Adelia began running toward it, sliding in the slush, falling, picking herself up, and blundering on. Whatever it was had to be helped; hearing it was unendurable.

Somebody splashed past her. She didn’t see who it was.

A wall of bushes loomed up. Frantically, she used her hands to follow it round toward the maze entrance, toward the screaming. It was diminishing now; there were words in it. Prayer? Pleading?

She found the entrance and plunged inside.

Curiously, it was easier to see in here, merely gloomy, as if the tunnels were bewilderment enough and had regimented the mist into their own coils. The hedged doors were open, still giving straight passage.

He’d gone a long way in, almost to the exit that led to the hill. The sound was softening into mumbles, like somebody discontented. As Adelia came up, it stopped altogether.

The last paroxysm had sent the abbot arching backward over the mantrap so that his stomach curved outward. His mouth was stretched open; he looked as if he’d died roaring with laughter.

She edged round to the front. Schwyz was scrabbling at the mess where the machine’s fangs had bitten into Eynsham’s groin. “It’s all right, Rob,” he was saying. “It’s all right.” He looked up at Adelia. “Help me.”

There was no point. He was dead. It would take two men to force the mantrap open. Only hate like the fires of hell had given Dakers the strength to lever the struts apart so that their jaws lay flat in the dirt, waiting to snap up the man who’d had Rosamund poisoned.

The housekeeper had sat herself a couple of feet away so that she could watch him die. And had died with him, smiling.

There was a lot of clearing up to do.

They brought the wounded down to Adelia on the landing stage, because she didn’t want to return to the tower. There weren’t many, and none were badly injured, most needing only a few stitches, which she managed with the contents of the king’s sewing case.

All were Plantagenet men; Henry hadn’t taken any prisoners.

She didn’t ask what had happened to Schwyz; she didn’t care much. Probably, he hadn’t, either.

One of the barges that came upriver from Godstow contained Rosamund’s much-traveled coffin. The Bishop of Saint Albans was aboard another. He’d been with Young Geoffrey at the storming of the abbey and looked tired enough to fall down. He kept his distance on seeing Adelia, though he thanked his God for her deliverance. Godstow had been liberated without loss on the Plantagenet side. Wolvercote, now in chains, was the only one who’d put up any resistance.

“Allie’s safe and well,” Rowley said. “So are Gyltha and Mansur. They were cheering us on from the guesthouse window.”

There was nothing else she needed to know. Yes, one thing. “Lawyer Warin,” she said. “Did you find him?”

“Little sniveling fellow? He was trying to escape via the back wall, so we put him in irons.”

“Good.”

The thaw was proceeding quickly. Untidy plates of ice floating downriver and bumping into the landing stage became smaller and smaller. She watched them; each one carried its own little cloud of thicker fog through the mist.

It was still very cold.

“Come up to the tower,” Rowley said. “Get warm.”

“No.”

He put his cloak around her, still without touching her. “Eleanor got away,” he said. “They’re hunting the woods for her.”

Adelia nodded. It didn’t matter one way or the other.

He shifted. “I’d better go to him. He’ll need me to bless the dead.”

“Yes,” she said.

He walked away, heading for the tower and his king.

Another coffin was carried to the landing stage, assembled from pieces of the bonfire. Dakers would be accompanying her mistress to the grave.

The rest of the dead were left piled in the courtyard until the ground should be soft enough to dig a common grave.

Henry came, urging on the loading, shouting to the oarsmen that if they didn’t row their hearts out, he’d have their bollocks; he was in a hurry to get to Godstow and then on to Oxford. He ushered Adelia aboard. The Bishop of Saint Albans, he told her, was staying behind to see to the burials.

The fog was too thick to allow a last glimpse of Wormhold Tower, even if Adelia had looked back, which she didn’t.

The Plantagenet wouldn’t go inside the cabin, being too concerned with piloting the rowers away from shoals, occasionally jotting notes on his slate book and studying the weather. “There’ll be a breeze soon,” he said.

He didn’t let Adelia go inside, either; he said she needed air and sat her down on a thwart in the stern. After a while, he joined her. “Better now?”

“I’m going back to Salerno,” she told him.

He sighed. “We’ve had this conversation before.”

They had, after the last time he’d used her to investigate deaths. “I am not your subject, Henry, I’m Sicily’s.”

“Yes, but this is England, and I say who comes and goes.”

She was silent, and he began wheedling. “I need you. And you wouldn’t like Salerno now, not after England; it’s too hot, you’d dry up like a prune.”

She compressed her lips and turned her head away. Damn him, don’t laugh.

“Eh?” he said. “Wouldn’t you? Eh?”

She had to ask. “Did you know Dakers would set the mantrap for Eynsham?”

He was astonished, hurt. If he hadn’t been trying to woo her, he’d have been angry. “How could I see what in hell the woman was dragging? It was too damn foggy.”

She’d never know. For the rest of her life, she’d be questioned by the image of the two of them, him and Dakers, sitting together in the garderobe, planning. “He’ll die, but not by my hand,” he had said. He’d been so certain.

“Nasty things, mantraps,” he said. “Never use ’em.” And paused. “Except for deer poachers.” And paused. “Who deserve ’em.” He paused again. “And then only ones that take the leg.”

She’d never know.

“I am returning to Salerno,” she said, very clear.

“It’d break Rowley’s heart, oath or not.”

It would probably break hers, but she was going anyway.

“You’ll stay.” The nearest oarsmen turned round at the shout. “I’ve had enough of rebellion.”

He was the king. The route to Salerno passed through vast tracts of land where nobody traveled without his permission.

“It’s his oath, isn’t it?” he said, wheedling again. “I wouldn’t have made it myself, but then, I’m not bound to chastity, thank the saints. We’ll have to see what we can do about that-I yield to nobody in my admiration for God, but He’s no good in bed.”

It was a quick journey; the thaw was putting the Thames into full spate, carrying the barge at speed. Henry spent the rest of the time making notes in his slate book. Adelia sat and stared into nothingness, which was all there was to see.

But the king was right, a light breeze had come up by the time they approached Godstow, and from some way off, the bridge became just visible. It appeared to be busy; the middle span was empty, but at each end people were milling around a single still figure.

As the barge passed the village, the activity among the group on this side of the bridge became clearer.

It was a hanging party. Taller than anybody else, Wolvercote stood in the middle of it with a noose around his neck while a man attached the other end of the rope to a stanchion. Beside him, the much smaller figure of Father Egbert muttered in prayer.

A young woman was watching the scene from the abbey end. The crowd of people behind her was keeping back, but one of them-Adelia recognized the matronly shape of Mistress Bloat-tugged at her daughter’s hand as if she were pleading. Emma paid no attention. Her eyes never left the scene on the other side of the bridge.

Seeing the barge, a young man leaned over the bridge’s parapet. His voice came clear and jolly. “Greetings, my lord, and my thanks to God for keeping you safe.” He grinned. “I knew He would.”

The oarsmen reversed their rowing stroke so that the boat could keep its position against the flow of the water and allow the exchange between king and son. Above them, Wolvercote kept his gaze on the sky. The sun was beginning to come out. A heron rose out of the rushes and flapped its gawky way farther downriver.

Henry put aside his slate book. “Well done, Geoffrey. Is everything secured?”

“All secure, my lord. And, my lord, the pursuers I put after the queen have sent word. She is caught and being brought back.”

Henry nodded. Pointing up at Wolvercote, he said, “Has he made confession for his sins?”

“For everything except his treachery to you, my lord. He refuses to be absolved for rebellion.”

“I wouldn’t absolve the swine anyway,” Henry said to Adelia. “Even the Lord’ll have to think twice.” He called back, “Tip him over, then, Geoffrey, and God have mercy on his soul.” He gestured to his oarsmen to row on.

As the boat passed by, two of the men lifted Wolvercote up and steadied him so that he stood balanced on the parapet.

Father Egbert raised his voice to begin the absolution: “Dominusnoster Jesus Christus…”

Adelia turned away. She was near enough now to see Emma’s face; it was completely expressionless.

“…Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nominee Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

There was a thump of suddenly tightened rope. Jeers and cheering went up from both ends of the bridge.

Adelia couldn’t watch, but she knew when Wolvercote had stopped struggling because it wasn’t until then that Emma turned and walked away.

A crowd of soldiers, nuns, and serving people, nearly everybody in the abbey had gathered on the meadow below the convent to cheer King Henry in.

For Adelia there were only three, a tall Arab, an elderly woman, and a child whose small hand was being flapped up and down in welcome.

She bowed her head in gratitude at the sight of them.

After all, I have no need for any but these.

Allie seemed to have learned another word, because Gyltha was trying to make her say it, first encouraging the baby and then pointing toward Adelia, who couldn’t hear it through the cheering.

There was a shout from the opposite bank that cut through the noise. “My lord, my lord. We have recovered the queen, my lord.”

At an order from Henry, the barge veered across the river toward a group of horsemen arriving through the trees. A man with the insignia of a captain of the Plantagenet guard was dismounting, while one of his soldiers helped the queen down from his horse where she’d been riding pillion.

A gate in the barge’s taffrail was opened and a gangplank laid across the gap between it and the bank. The captain, a worried-looking man, came aboard.

“How did she get across the river?” Henry asked.

“There was an old wherry further down, my lord. We think Lord Montignard poled her across…my lord, he tried to delay her capture, he fought like a wolf, my lord…he…”

“They killed him,” the queen called from the bank. She was brushing the soldier’s restraining hand off her arm like a speck of dust.

The king went forward to help her aboard. “Eleanor.”

“Henry.”

“I like the disguise, you look well in it.”

She was dressed like a boy, and she did look well in it, though as a disguise it would have fooled nobody; her figure was slim enough, but the muddy, short cloak and boots, the angle of the cap she’d stuffed her hair into, were worn with too much style.

The cheering from the abbey had stopped; there was an openmouthed silence as if people on the far bank were watching a meeting between warring Olympians and waiting for the thunderbolts.

There weren’t any. Adelia, crouched in the stern, watched two people who had known each other too well and been too long together to surprise now; they had conceived eight children and seen one of them die, ruled great countries together, made laws together, put down rebellions together, quarreled, laughed, and loved together, and if, now, all that had ended in a metaphorical attempt to disembowel each other, it was still in their eyes and hung in the air between them.

As if, even now, she couldn’t bear to look anything but feminine for him, Eleanor took off her cap and sent it spinning into the river. It was a mistake; the boy’s costume became grotesque as the long, graying hair of a fifty-year-old woman fell over its shoulders.

Gently, mercifully, her husband took off his cloak and put it around her. “There, my dear.”

“Well, Henry,” she said, “where’s it to be this time? Back to Anjou and Chinon?”

The king shook his head. “I was thinking more of Sarum.”

She tutted. “Oh, not Sarum, Henry, it’s in England.”

“I know, my love, but the trouble with Chinon was that you insisted on escaping from it.”

“But Sarum,” she persisted. “So dull.”

“Well, well, if you’re a good girl, I’ll let you out for Easter and Christmas.” He gestured to the rowers to take up their oars. “For now, though, we’re making for Oxford. Some rebels there are waiting for me to hang them.”

An enraptured Adelia woke up in panic. There was a river between her and her child. “My lord, my lord, let me off first.”

He’d forgotten her. “Oh, very well.” And to the rowers, “Make for the other bank.”

Against fast running water, the procedure was lengthy, and the king tutted irritably all through it. By the time the barge was settled at a disembarking point on the requisite bank, it had gone long past the abbey, and Adelia was handed ashore on a deserted stretch of meadow into mud that she sank in up to the tops of her boots.

The king liked that. He leaned over the taffrail, humor restored. “You’ll have to squelch back,” he said.

“Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord.”

The barge took off, its dipping and rising oars sending glittering droplets back onto the surface of the water.

Suddenly, the king was running along the barge’s length to the stern so that he could tell her one more thing. “About the bishop’s oath,” he called, “don’t worry about it. ‘…if You will guard her and keep her safe…’ Very nicely phrased.”

She called back. “Was it?”

“Yes.” The rapidly increasing distance between them was forcing him to shout. “Adelia, you’re my investigator into the dead, like it or not…”

All she could see now was the Plantagenet three-leopard pennant fluttering as the barge rounded a wooded bend, but the king’s voice carried cheerfully over its trees: “You’re never going to be safe.”