The Serpent’s Tale

TWO

Cambridge hadn’t expected to see its bishop again so soon. Eighteen months ago, after his appointment to the see of Saint Albans, the town had turned out for him with all the pomp due a man whose word ranked only a little below that of God, the Pope, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

With equal pomp, it had seen him off on an inaugural circuit of his diocese that, because it was huge, like all England’s sees, would take him more than two years to complete.

Yet here he was, before his time, without the lumbering baggage train that had accompanied him when he left, and with gallopers coming only a few hours ahead to warn of his arrival.

Still, Cambridge turned out for him. In strength. Some people fell on their knees or held up their children to receive the great man’s blessing; others ran at his stirrup, babbling their grievances for him to mend. Most just enjoyed the spectacle.

A popular man, Bishop Rowley Picot. One of Cambridge’s own. Been on Crusade. A king’s appointee to the bishopric, too, not the Pope’s. Which was good, King Henry II being nearer and more immediately powerful than the Vatican.

Not one of your dry-as-a-stick bishops, either: known to have a taste for hunting, grub, and his drink, with an eye for the ladies, so they said, but given all that up since God tapped him on the shoulder. And hadn’t he brought to justice the child murderers who’d terrorized the town a while back?

Mansur and Adelia, followed disconsolately by the bishop’s messenger, had insisted on scouring Cambridge’s fair for Gyltha, and now, having found her, Mansur was holding her up so that she could peer over the heads of the crowd to watch the bishop go by. “Dressed like a Christmas beef, bless him,” Gyltha reported down to Adelia. “Ain’t you going to let little un look?”

“No,” Adelia said, pressing her child more closely to her.

“Got a crosier and ever’thing,” Gyltha persisted. “Not sure that hat suits un, though.”

In her mind’s eye, Adelia saw a portly, portentous, mitered figure representing, as most bishops did, the hypocrisy and suffocation of a church that opposed not only herself but every advance necessary for the mental and physical health of mankind.

There was a touch on her shoulder. “If you would follow me, mistress. His lordship is to grant you an audience in his house, but first he must receive the sheriff and celebrate Mass.”

“Grant us a audience,” Gyltha mimicked as Mansur lowered her to the ground. “That’s rich, that is.”

“Um.” The bishop’s messenger-his name had turned out to be Jacques-was still off-balance; Saracens and fishwives were not the sort of people he was in service to deal with. Somewhat desperately, he said, “Mistress, I believe my lord expects his interview to be with you only.”

“This lady and gentleman come with me,” Adelia told him, “or I don’t go.”

Being in Cambridge again was distressing her. The worst moments of her life, and the best, had passed in this town; the place was haunted by spirits whose bones rested in peace while others still shrieked to a god that hadn’t heard them.

“The dog, too,” she added, and saw the poor messenger’s eyes roll. She didn’t care; it had been a concession to come at all. When she’d stopped off at her house on the way in order to pack suitable winter clothing for them all, she had gone so far as to wash her hair and change into her best dress, shabby though it now was. Further than that, she would not go.

The episcopal residence-the bishop had one in every major town in the diocese-was in Saint Mary’s parish, a building now abuzz with servants preparing it for unexpected habitation.

Followed by the dog, Ward, the three were shown into a large upstairs chamber where dust sheets were now being whisked off heavy, ornate furniture. An open door at its far end revealed the gilt and plaster of a bedroom where footmen were hanging brocade drapes from the tester of a magnificent bed.

One of them saw Mansur looking in and crossed the room to shut the door in his face. Ward lifted his leg and piddled against the door’s carved arch.

“Tha’s a good dog,” Gyltha said.

Adelia hefted the rush basket holding her sleeping baby onto a brassbound chest, fetched a stool, undid her bodice laces, and began the feed. What a remarkable child, she thought, gazing down at it, accustomed to the quiet of the fens yet showing no fear, only interest, amid the hubbub that had been Cambridge today.

“Well,” Gyltha said to her. The two women hadn’t had a moment until now in which to talk privately.

“Exactly.”

“What’s his lordship want with you, then?”

Adelia shrugged. “To look into an attempted murder in Oxfordshire, so Prior Geoffrey said.”

“Didn’t think you’d come for that.”

“I wouldn’t have, but it’s on the king’s orders, apparently.”

“Oh, bugger,” Gyltha said.

“Indeed.” Henry Plantagenet’s was the ultimate command; you could squirm under it, but you disobeyed it at your peril.

There were times when Adelia resented Henry II bitterly for marooning her on the island of Britain so that, having discovered her talents at reading the secrets of the dead, he could use them again. There were other times when she didn’t.

Letters had originally passed between the English king and his royal kinsman, William of Sicily, requesting help for the problem in Cambridge that only Salerno’s investigative tradition could provide. It had been a shock to everybody that Salerno obliged by sending a mistress of the art of death rather than a master, but things had turned out well-for Henry II, at least. So much so that other letters had passed between him and King William requesting-and granting-that Adelia stay where she was awhile longer.

It had been done without her request or permission, an act of naked piracy, typical of the man. “I’m not an object,” she’d shouted at him. “You can’t borrow me, I’m a human being.”

“And I’m a king,” Henry told her. “If I say you stay, you stay.”

Damn him, he hadn’t even paid her for all she’d done, for the danger, for the loss of beloved friends-to the end of her days, she would mourn for Simon of Naples, that wise and gentle man whose companionship had been like a second father’s. And her dog, a much lesser loss but, nevertheless, a grief.

On the other hand, to weight the scale, she had retained her dear Mansur, gained an affection for England and its people, been awarded the friendship of Prior Geoffrey, Gyltha and her grandson, and, best of all, acquired her baby.

Also, although the Plantagenet was a crafty, hot-tempered, parsimonious swine, he was still a great king, a very great king, and not just because he ruled an empire of countries stretching from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees. The quarrel between him and his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, would damn him forever, ending as it had in the archbishop’s murder. But Henry’d had the right of it, in Adelia’s opinion, and it had been disastrous for the world that the Jew-hating, self-aggrandizing, backward-looking Becket’s refusal to allow any reform of the equally backward-looking English Church had driven his king into uttering the dreadful cry “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” For immediately it had been taken up by some of his knights with their own reasons for wanting Becket dead. They’d slipped away across the Channel to Canterbury and committed a deed that had resulted in making a martyred saint out of a brave but stupid and blinkered man while, at the same time, giving the Church every excuse to scourge a king who’d wanted to curb its power and allow greater justice to his people with laws more fair, more humane than any in the world.

Yes, they called Henry Plantagenet a fiend, and there were times when Adelia thought he probably was, but she also knew that his ferocious blue eyes saw further into the future than any other man’s. He’d succeeded to the throne of an England blasted and impoverished by civil war and given it a secure prosperity that was the envy of other lands.

It was said his wife and his sons resented and had plotted against him and, again, Adelia could see why-he was so far ahead of everybody else, so quick, that their relationship with him could provide no more than metaphorically clinging to his stirrup as he rode.

Yet when the Church would have put Adelia on trial during her search for the murderer of Cambridge’s children, it was this busy king who’d found time to step in and exonerate her.

Well, so he should, she thought. Wasn’t I saving him trouble and money? I’m not his subject, I am a Sicilian; he has no right to coerce me into his service.

Which would have been an unquestionably reasonable sentiment if, sometimes, Adelia didn’t feel that to be in the service of Henry II of England was a privilege.

Nevertheless, she damned his eyes for him and, for the sake of her child’s digestion, tried to clear him from her mind. Trouble was, the vast room around her reflected a Church that made her angrier than Henry ever could. Here was nothing that was not rigidly and opulently religious-the bishop’s massive chair, a cushioned, gold-inlaid prie-dieu where his lordship could kneel in comfort to the Christ, who’d died in poverty, air stuffy with incense. Urging herself to despise it, Adelia contrasted it with Prior Geoffrey’s room at the priory, which was all the holier for its reminders of the profane-fishing rods in a corner, the smell of good food, an exquisite little bronze Aphrodite brought back from Rome, the framed letter from a pupil he was proud of.

She finished feeding. Gyltha took the child from her to burp it, an occupation both women vied for-there was no more satisfying sound than that tiny belch. Because the newly lit brazier had not yet begun to warm the room, Gyltha added another blanket to the basket before she put it in the shadows to let the baby sleep. Then she went to stand by the brazier and looked around with complacence. “Murder, eh? Old team and old days back again.”

“Attempted murder,” Adelia reminded her. “And no, they aren’t.”

“Do make a change to go travelin’, though,” Gyltha said. “Better’n a winter iced into they bloody fens.”

“You love winter in the fens. So do I.” Adelia had learned to skate.

“Don’t mean as I can’t enjoy somewheres else.” Old as she was, Gyltha had an adventurous spirit. She gave a rub to her backside and nodded toward the basket. “What’s his lordship going say to our little treasure, then?”

“I can only hope,” Adelia said, “that he won’t ask whose it is.”

Gyltha blinked. “Ooh, that’s nasty. He’s not a’goin’ to do that, ’course he not a’goin’ to do that. What’s set your maggots bitin’?”

“I don’t want us to be here, Gyltha. Bishops, kings, they’ve got no right to ask anything of me. I won’t do it.”

“You got any choice, girl?”

There was a step on the landing outside. Adelia gritted her teeth, but it was a small priest who came in. He carried the holder of a lit candle in one hand and a slate book in the other, raising the light high and making a slow arc with it, peering at each face with shortsighted eyes.

“I am Father Paton, his lordship’s secretary,” he said. “And you are…yes, yes.” To make sure, he put his book on a table, opened it, and held the candle near. “An Arab male and two females, yes.” He looked up. “You will be provided with transport, service, and provisions to Oxford and back, a winter cloak each, firing, plus a rate of a shilling a day each until such time as his lordship is satisfied the work be done. You will have no expectation beyond that.”

He peered at his slate once more. “Ah, yes, his lordship has been informed of a baby and expressed his willingness to give it his blessing.” He waited for appreciation. Getting none, he said, “It can be conveyed to him. Is it here?”

Gyltha moved to stand between him and the basket.

The priest didn’t see his danger; instead, he looked once more at his slate and, unused to dealing with women, addressed Mansur. “It says here you are some sort of doctor?”

Again, there was no reply. Apart from the priest, the room was very still.

“These are your instructions. To discover the culprit whom, three days ago”-he checked the date-“yes, it was the celebration of Saint Leocadia…three days ago, made an attempt on the life of the woman Rosamund Clifford of Wormhold Tower near Oxford. You will require the help of the nuns of Godstow in this endeavor.” He tapped the slate with a bony finger. “It must be pointed out that, should the aforesaid nuns offer you free accommodation at the convent, your payment shall be reduced accordingly.”

He peered at them, then returned to the main thrust. “Any information is to be sent to his lordship immediately as it is gained-a messenger to be provided for the purpose-and you will tell no one else of your findings, which must be unearthed with discretion.”

He scanned his book for more detail, found none, and clapped it shut. “Horses and a conveyance will be at the door within an hour, and food is being prepared in the meantime. To be provided without charge.” His nose twitched at his generosity.

Was that all? No, one more thing. “I imagine the baby will prove a hindrance to the investigation; therefore, I have commissioned a nurse to look after it in your absence.” He seemed proud to have thought of it. “I am informed the going rate is a penny a day, which will be deducted…Ow, ow, put me down.”

Dangling by the back of his surplice from Mansur’s hand, he had the appearance of a surprised kitten.

He’s very young, Adelia thought, although he will look the same at forty. I would be sorry for him if he didn’t frighten me so much; he’d have taken my baby away without a thought.

Gyltha was informing the struggling kitten. “You see, lad,” she said, bending to put her face close, “we come to see Bishop Rowley.”

“No, no, that is impossible. His lordship departs for Normandy tomorrow and has much to do before then.” Somehow, horizontally, the little priest achieved dignity. “I attend to his affairs…”

But the door had opened and a procession was entering in a blaze of candles, bearing at its center a figure from an illuminated manuscript, majestic in purple and gold.

Gyltha’s right, Adelia thought immediately, the miter doesn’t suit him. Then she took in the set of jowls, the dulled eyes, so changed from the man she remembered.

No, we’re wrong: It does.

His lordship assessed the situation. “Put him down, Mansur,” he said in Arabic.

Mansur opened his hand.

Both pages carrying his lordship’s train leaned out sideways to peer at the ragbag of people who had floored Father Paton. A white-haired functionary began hammering on the tiles with his wand of office.

Only the bishop appeared unmoved. “All right, steward,” he said. “Good evening, Mistress Adelia. Good evening, Gyltha, you look well.”

“So do you, bor.”

“How’s Ulf?”

“At school. Prior says as he’s doing grand.”

The steward blinked; this was lèse-majesté. He watched his bishop turn to the Arab. “Dr. Mansur, as-salaam alaykum.”

“Wa alaykum as-salaam.”

This was worse. “My lord…”

“Supper will be served up here as quickly as may be, steward, we are short of time.”

We, thought Adelia. The episcopal “we.”

“Your vestments, my lord…Shall I fetch your dresser?”

“Paton will divest me.” The bishop sniffed, searching for the source of a smell. He found it and added, “Also, bring a bone for the dog.”

“Yes, my lord.” Pitiably, the steward wafted the other servants from the room.

The bishop processed to the bedroom, the secretary following and explaining what he had done, what they had done. “I cannot understand the antagonism, my lord, I merely made arrangements based on the information supplied to me from Oxford.”

Bishop Rowley’s voice: “Which seem to have become somewhat garbled on the journey.”

“Yet I obeyed them as best I could, to the letter, my lord… I cannot understand…” Outpourings of a man misjudged came to them through the open door as, at the same time, Father Paton divested his master of cope, dalmatic, rochet, pallium, gloves, and miter, layer after layer of embroidered trappings that had employed many needlewomen for many years, all lifted off and folded with infinite care. It took time.

“Rosamund Clifford?” Mansur asked Gyltha.

“You know her, you heathen. Fair Rosamund as they sing about-the king’s pet fancy. Lots of songs about Fair Rosamund.”

That Rosamund. Adelia remembered hearing the ha’penny minstrels on market days, and their songs-some romantic, most of them bawdy.

If he’s dragged me here to involve me in the circumstances of a loose woman…

Then she reminded herself that she, too, must now be numbered among the world’s loose women.

“So she’ve near been murdered, has she?” Gyltha said, happily. “Per’aps Queen Eleanor done it. Tried to get her out of the way, like. Green jealous of Rosamund, Eleanor is.”

“The songs say that as well, do they?” Adelia asked.

“That they do.” Gyltha considered. “No, now I think on’t, can’t be the queen as done it; last I heard, the king had her in prison.”

The mighty and their activities were another country, in another country. By the time reports of what they were up to reached the fens, they had achieved the romance and remoteness of myth, nothing to do with real people, and less than nothing compared to a river flooding or cows dead from the murrain or, in Adelia’s case, the birth of a baby.

Once, it had been different. During the war of Stephen and Matilda, news of their comings and goings was vital, so you could know in advance-and hopefully escape-whichever king’s, queen’s, or baron’s army was likely to come trampling your crops. Since much of the trampling had taken place in the fens, Gyltha had then been as aware of politics as any.

But out of that terrible time had emerged a Plantagenet ruler like a king from a fairy tale, establishing peace, law, and prosperity in England. If there were wars, they took place abroad, blessed be the Mother of God.

The wife Henry brought with him to the throne had also stepped out of a fairy tale-a highly colored one. Here was no shy virgin princess; Eleanor was the greatest heiress in Europe, a radiant personality who’d ruled her Duchy of Aquitaine in her own right before wedding the meek and pious King Louis of France-a man who’d bored her so much that the marriage had ended in divorce. At which point nineteen-year-old Henry Plantagenet had stepped forward to woo the beautiful thirty-year-old Eleanor and marry her, thus taking over her vast estates and making himself ruler of a greater area of France than that belonging to its resentful King Louis.

The stories about Eleanor were legion and scandalous: She’d accompanied Louis on crusade with a bare-breasted company of Amazons; she’d slept with her uncle Raymond, Prince of Antioch; she’d done this, done that…

But if her new English subjects expected to be entertained by more naughty exploits, they were disappointed. For the next decade or so, Eleanor faded quietly into the background, doing her queenly and wifely duty by providing Henry with five sons and three daughters.

As was expected of a healthy king, Henry had other children by other women-what ruler did not?-but Eleanor seemed to take them in her stride, even having young Geoffrey, one of her husband’s bastards by a prostitute, brought up with the legitimate children in the royal court.

A happy marriage, then, as marriages went.

Until…

What had caused the rift in the lute? The advent of Rosamund, young, lovely, the highest-born of Henry’s women? His affair with her became legendary, a matter for song; he adored her, called her Rosa Mundi, Rose of all the World, had tucked her away in a tower near his hunting lodge at Woodstock and enclosed it in a labyrinth so that nobody else should find the way through…

Poor Eleanor was in her fifties now, unable to bear any more children. Had menopausal jealousy caused her rage? Because rage there must certainly have been for her to goad her eldest son, Young Henry, into rebellion against his father. Queens had died for much less. In fact, it was a wonder her husband hadn’t executed her instead of condemning her to a not uncomfortable imprisonment.

Well, delightful as it was to speculate on these things, they were all a long way away. Whatever sins had led to Queen Eleanor’s imprisonment, they had been committed in Aquitaine, or Anjou, or the Vexin, one of those foreign places over which the Plantagenet royal family also ruled. Most English people weren’t sure in what manner the queen had offended; certainly Gyltha was not. She didn’t care much. Neither did Adelia.

There was a sudden shout from the bedroom. “It’s here? She’s brought it here?” Now down to his tunic, a man who looked younger and thinner but still very large stood in the doorway, staring around him. He loped to the basket on the table. “My God,” he said, “my God.”

You dare, Adelia thought, you dare ask whose it is.

But the bishop was staring downward with the awe of Pharaoh’s daughter glimpsing baby Moses in the reeds. “Is this him? My God, he looks just like me.”

“She,” Gyltha said. “She looks just like you.”

How typical of church gossips, Adelia thought viciously, that they would be quick to tell him she’d had his baby without mentioning its sex.

“A daughter.” Rowley scooped up the child and held her high. The baby blinked from sleep and then crowed with him. “Any fool can have a son,” he said. “It takes a man to conceive a daughter.”

That’s why I loved him.

“Who’s her daddy’s little moppet, then,” he was saying, “who’s got eyes like cornflowers, so she has-yes, she has-just like her daddy’s. And teeny-weeny toes. Yumm, yumm, yumm. Does she like that? Yes, she does.”

Adelia was helplessly aware of Father Paton regarding the scene. She wanted to tell Rowley he was giving himself away; this delight was not episcopal. But presumably a secretary was privy to all his master’s secrets-and it was too late now, anyway.

The bishop looked up. “Is she going to be bald? Or will this fuzz on her head grow? What’s her name?”

“Allie,” Gyltha said.

“Ali?”

“Almeisan.” Adelia spoke for the first time, reluctantly. “Mansur named her. Almeisan is a star.”

“An Arab name.”

“Why not?” She was ready to attack. “Arabs taught the world astronomy. It’s a beautiful name, it means the shining one.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful. It’s just that I would have called her Ariadne.”

“Well, you weren’t there,” Adelia said nastily.

Ariadne had been his private name for her. The two of them had met on the same road, and at the same time that she’d encountered Prior Geoffrey. Although they hadn’t known it then, they were also on the same errand; Rowley Picot was ostensibly one of King Henry’s tax collectors but privately had been clandestinely ordered by his royal master to find the beast that was killing Cambridgeshire’s children and thereby damaging the royal revenue. Willy-nilly, the two of them had found themselves following clues together. Like Ariadne, she had led him to the beast’s lair. Like Theseus, he had rescued her from it.

And then, like Theseus, abandoned her.

She knew she was being unfair; he’d asked, begged, her to marry him, but by this time he’d earned the king’s approbation and was earmarked for an advancement that needed a wife devoted to him, their children, his estates-a conventional English chatelaine, not a woman who neither would nor could give up her duty to the living and dead.

What she couldn’t forgive him for was doing what she’d told him to do: leave her, go away, forget, take up the king’s offer of a rich bishopric.

God torment him, he might have written.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve seen her, and now we are leaving.”

“Are we?” This was Gyltha. “In’t we going to stay for supper?”

“No.” She had been looking for insult from the first and had found it. “If someone has attempted to harm this Rosamund Clifford, I am sorry for it, but it is nothing to do with me.”

She crossed the room to take the baby from him. It brought them close so that she could smell the incense from the Mass he’d celebrated clinging to him, infecting their child with it. His eyes weren’t Rowley’s anymore, they were those of a bishop, very tired-he’d traveled hard from Oxford-and very grave.

“Not even if it means civil war?” he said.

The pork was sent back so that the smell of it should not offend Dr. Mansur’s nose and dietary law, but there were lampreys and pike in aspic, four different kinds of duck, veal in blancmange, a crisp, golden polonaise of bread, a sufficiency for twenty and-whether it displeased Mohammedan nostrils or not-enough wine for twenty more, served in beautiful cameo-cut glass bowls.

Once it had all been placed on the board, the servants were sent from the room. Father Paton was allowed to remain. From the straw under the table came the crunch of a dog with a bone.

“He had to imprison her,” Rowley said of his king and Queen Eleanor. “She was encouraging the Young King to rebel against his father.”

“Never understood that,” Gytha said, chewing a leg of duck. “Not why Henry had his boy crowned king along of him, I mean. Old King and Young King ruling at the same time. Bound to cause trouble.”

“Henry’d just been very ill,” Rowley told her. “He wanted to make sure of a peaceful succession if he died-he didn’t want a recurrence of another Stephen and Matilda war.”

Gyltha shuddered. “Nor we don’t, neither.”

It was a strange dinner. Bishop Rowley was being forced to put his case to a Cambridgeshire housekeeper and an Arab because the woman he needed to solve it would not look at him. Adelia sat silent and unresponsive, eating very little.

He’s a different creature, there’s nothing of the man I knew. Damn him, how was it so easy for him to stop loving me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Deary dear,” Gyltha said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you sure?”

“Not Eleanor. I know her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good works?”

“When I can.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You devil,” she said.

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

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

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

“Yes,” she said. “His name’s Ward.”

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

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

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

She interrupted. “Is it at risk?”

“The labyrinth?”

“Your virtue.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s dead, Rowley,” Adelia said.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

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