The Serpent’s Tale

FOUR

Godstow Abbey with its surrounding grounds and fields was actually a large island formed by curves of the Thames’s upper reaches and tributaries. Although the porter who unbarred its gates to the travelers was a man, as were the groom and ostler who saw to their horses, it was an island ruled by women.

If asked, its twenty-four nuns and their female pensioners would have insisted that it was the Lord God who had called them to abandon the world, but their air of contentment suggested that the Lord’s wish had coincided exactly with their own. Some were widows with money who’d heard God’s call at their husband’s graveside and hurried to answer it at Godstow before they could be married off again. Some were maidens who, glimpsing the husbands selected for them, had been overwhelmed by a sudden vocation for chastity and had taken their dowries with them into the convent instead. Here they could administer a sizable, growing fiefdom efficiently and with a liberal hand-and they could do it without male interference.

The only men over them were Saint Benedict, to whose rule they were subject and who was dead these six hundred and fifty years; the Pope, who was a long way away; the Archbishop of Canterbury, often ditto; and an investigative archdeacon who, because they kept their books and their behavior in scrupulous order, could make no complaint of them.

Oh, and the Bishop of Saint Albans.

So rich was Godstow that it possessed two churches. One, tucked away against the abbey’s western wall, was small and acted as the nuns’ private chapel. The other, much larger, stood on the east, near the road, and had been built to provide a place of worship for the people of the surrounding villages.

In effect, the abbey was a village in itself, in which the holy sisters had their own precincts, and it was to these that the travelers were taken by the porter. A maid carrying a yoke squeaked at the sight of them and then curtsied, spilling some milk from the buckets. The porter’s lantern shone on passageways and courtyards, the sudden, sculptured pillars of a cloister where the shutters of the porter’s windows opened to show white-coifed heads like pale poppies whispering, “Bishop, the bishop,” along the row.

Rowley Picot, so big, so full of energy and intent, so loudly male, was a cockerel erupting into a placid coop of hens that had been managing happily without him.

They were met by the prioress, still pinning her veil in place, and begged to wait in the chapter house where the abbess would attend them. In the meantime, please to take refreshment. Had the ladies any requirements? And the baby, such a fine little fellow, what might be done for him?

The beauty of the chapter house relied on the sweep of unadorned wooden crucks and arches. Candles lit a tiled floor strewn with fresh rushes and were reflected back in the sheen of a long table and chairs. Besides the scent of apple logs in the brazier, there was a smell of sanctity and beeswax-and now, thanks to Ward, the stink of unsavory dog.

Rowley strode the room, irritated by the wait, but, for the first time since the journey began, Adelia fed young Allie in the tranquillity the baby deserved. Its connection with Rosamund Clifford had made her afraid that the abbey would be disorderly, the nuns lax and no better than they should be. She still had bad memories of Saint Radegund’s in Cambridge, the only other religious English sisterhood she’d encountered until now-a troubled place where, eventually, a participant in child killing had been unmasked.

Here at Godstow the atmosphere spoke of safety, tidiness, discipline, everything in its place.

She began to doze, lulled by the soporific mutterings of Father Paton as he chalked the reckonings onto his slate book. “To cheese and ale on the journey…to provender for the horses…”

A nudge from Gyltha got her to her feet. A small, very old nun, leaning on an ivory-topped walking stick, had come in. Rowley extended his hand; the nun bent creakily over it to kiss the episcopal ring on his finger. Everybody bowed.

The abbess sat herself at the head of the board, took trouble to lean her stick against her chair, clasped her hands, and listened.

Much of Godstow’s felicity, Adelia realized within minutes, was due to this tiny woman. Mother Edyve had the disinterested calm of elderly people who had seen everything and were now watching it come around for the second time. This young bishop-a stripling compared to her-could not discompose her, though he arrived with a Saracen, two women, a baby, and an unprepossessing dog among his train, telling her that he had found a murdered man outside her gates.

Even the fact that the bishop wished to conceal the corpse in her icehouse was met calmly. “Thus you hope to find the killer?” she asked.

“Killer sss, Abbess,” the bishop hissed impatiently. Once again, he went over the evidence found by Dr. Mansur and his assistant.

Adelia thought that Mother Edyve had probably grasped it the first time; she was merely giving herself time to consider. The wrinkly lidded eyes embedded into a face like creased calfskin closed as she listened, her veined hands reflected in the high polish of the table.

Rowley ended with, “We are assured that there are people who wish the young man’s death and name to be broadcast; when there is only silence, they may return to find out why.”

“A trap, then.” It was said without emphasis.

“A trap is necessary to see justice done,” Rowley persisted, “and only you to know about it, Abbess.”

He is asking a great deal of her, Adelia thought. To conceal a body unmourned and unburied is surely against the law and certainly unchristian.

On the other hand, according to what Rowley had told her, this old woman had kept both her convent and her nuns inviolate during thirteen years of civil war, much of it waged in this very area, a feat suggesting that the rules of men, and even God’s, must have been tinkered with somewhere along the line.

Mother Edyve opened her eyes. “I can tell you this, my lord: The bridge is ours. It is our convent’s duty to maintain its structure and its peace and, by extension therefore, to catch those who commit murder on it.”

“You agree, then?” Rowley was taken aback; he’d expected resistance.

“However,” the abbess said, still distantly, as if he hadn’t spoken, “you will need the assistance of my daughter prioress.” Sliding it along her belt from under her scapular, Mother Edyve produced the largest chatelaine Adelia had ever seen; it was a wonder it didn’t weigh her to the floor. Among the massive keys attached to it was a small bell. She rang it.

The prioress who had first greeted them came in. “Yes, Mother?”

Now that she could compare them, Adelia saw that Sister Havis had the same flat face and the same calfskin, though slightly less crinkled, complexion as the abbess. “Daughter prioress,” then, was not a pious euphemism; Edyve had brought her child with her to Godstow when she took the veil.

“Our lord bishop has with him a consignment for our icehouse, Sister Havis. It will be stored there secretly during Lauds.” A key was detached from the great iron ring and handed over. “There shall be no mention of it to any soul until further notice.”

“Yes, Mother.” Sister Havis bowed to her bishop, then to her mother, and left. No surprise. No questions. Godstow’s icehouse, Adelia decided, must have stored more than sides of beef in its time. Treasure? Escapers? Situated as it was between the town of Wallingford, which had held out for Queen Matilda, and Oxford Castle, where King Stephen’s flag had flown, there might well have been a need to hide both.

Allie was wriggling, and Gyltha, who was holding her, looked interrogatively at Adelia and then at the floor.

Adelia nodded, clean enough. Allie was put down to crawl, an exercise she was refusing to perform, preferring to hitch herself along on her backside. Wearily, the dog Ward disposed himself so that his ears could be pulled.

Rowley wasn’t even thanking the abbess for her cooperation; he had moved on to a matter more important to him. “And now, madam, what of Rosamund Clifford?”

“Yes, the Lady Rosamund.” It was spoken as distantly as ever, but Mother Edyve’s hands tightened slightly. “They are saying it was the queen poisoned her.”

“I was afraid they would.”

“And I am afraid it may precipitate war.”

There was a silence. Abbess and bishop were in accord now, as if they shared a foul secret. Once again, trampling horsemen milled around the memories of those who had known civil war, emitting to Adelia a turbulence so strong that she wanted to pick up her baby. Instead, she kept an eye on her in case the child made for the brazier.

“Has her corpse arrived?” Rowley asked abruptly.

“No.”

“I thought it had been arranged; it was to be carried here for burial.” He was accusatory, the abbess’s fault. Whereas, thought Adelia, any other bishop would have commended a convent that refused to inter a notorious woman in its ground.

Mother Edyve looked down the side of her chair. Allie was trying to pull herself up by one of its legs. Adelia rose to go and remove her but the abbess held her back with an admonishing finger, then, without a change of expression, took the little bell from her chatelaine and passed it down.

You know babies, Adelia thought, comforted.

“Our foundation is indebted to the Lady Rosamund for many past kindnesses.” Mother Edyve’s voice tweeted like a distant bird. “We owe her body burial and all the services for her soul. It was arranged, yet her housekeeper, Dakers, refuses to release the corpse to us.”

“Why not?”

“I cannot say, but without her consent, it is difficult to amend the situation.”

“In the name of God, why not?”

Something, and it might have been a gleam of amusement, disturbed the immobility of the abbess’s face for half a second. From the floor by her chair came a tinkling as Allie investigated her new toy. “I believe you visited Wormhold Tower during the lady’s illness, my lord?”

“You know I did. Your prioress…Sister Havis fetched me from Oxford to do so.”

“And both of you were led through the labyrinth surrounding the tower?”

“Some crackbrained female met us at the entrance to it, yes.” Rowley’s fingers tapped on the table; he hadn’t sat down since entering the room.

“Dame Dakers.” Again, the suggestion of amusement like the merest breath on a pond. “I understand she will admit nobody since her mistress died. She adored her. My lord, I fear without she guides you through the labyrinth, there is no way of gaining the tower.”

“I’ll gain it. By God, I’ll gain it. No body shall remain unburied whilst I am bishop here…” He stopped, and then he laughed; he’d brought one through the gates with him.

It is his saving grace, Adelia thought as she melted and smiled with him, to see the incongruity of things. She watched him apologize to the abbess for his manner and thank her for her amiability-until she saw that the nun’s pale old eyes had turned and were watching her watching him.

The abbess returned to the subject. “Dame Dakers’s attachment to her mistress was”-the adjective was carefully considered-“formidable. The unfortunate servant responsible for bringing in the fatal mushrooms has fled from the tower in fear of her life and has sought sanctuary with us.”

“She’s here? Good. I want to question her.” He corrected himself. “With your permission, madam, I should like to question her.”

The abbess inclined her head.

“And if I may trespass on your kindness a little more,” Rowley went on, “I would leave some of my party here while Dr. Mansur and his assistant accompany me to Wormhold Tower and see what may be done. As I say, the good doctor here has investigative abilities that can enable us…”

Not yet. Not today. For God’s sake, Rowley, we’ve traveled hard.

Adelia coughed and caught Gyltha’s eye. Gyltha nudged Mansur, who stood next to her. Mansur looked round at them both, then spoke in English and for the first time. “Your doctor advise rest first.” He added, “My lord.”

“Rest be damned,” Rowley said, but he looked toward Adelia, who must go with him when he went, or why was she here?

She shook her head. We need rest, Rowley. You need it.

The abbess’s eyes had followed the exchange and, if it had told her nothing else, though it probably had, she’d learned enough to know the matter was settled. “When you have disposed of the unfortunate gentleman’s body, Sister Havis will see to your accommodation,” she said.

It was still very dark and very cold. The nuns were chanting Lauds in their chapel, and everybody else with a duty to do was performing it within the complex of buildings, out of sight of the main gates, where a covered carriage containing a dead man had been left just inside them.

Walt and the men-at-arms were guarding it. They stood, stamping and slapping their arms to keep warm, stolidly ignoring the inquisition of the convent porter, who was leaning out of a bottom window in the gatehouse. Sister Havis told him sharply to withdraw his head, close the shutters, and mind his own business. “Keep thy silence, Fitchet.”

“Don’t I?” Fitchet was aggrieved. “Don’t I always keep it?” The shutters slammed.

“He does,” Sister Havis said. “Mostly.” Holding the lantern high, she stalked ahead of them through the snow.

Walt led the horses after her, the bishop, Oswald, and Aelwyn marching beside him, with Adelia and Mansur above them on the cart’s driving seat.

Rowley, aware now that he had tired her, would have left Adelia in the room that had been prepared for her and Gyltha and the baby in the guesthouse, but this dead young man was her responsibility. However good the reason, his body was being treated disgracefully at her behest; she must accord it what respect she could.

They were following the wall that ringed the convent’s extensive buildings and gardens to where it ran into the woods in which, on the other side, lay the dead man’s dead horse.

The rush of water that they’d heard from on the bridge became loud; they were close to the river, either the Thames itself or a fast stream running into it that gushed up even colder air. The noise became tremendous.

Mansur pointed; he and Adelia were seated high enough on the cart to see over the wall and, when trees allowed, across the water itself. There was their bridge and, on its far side, a water mill.

The Arab was saying something-she couldn’t hear him-perhaps that the mill had been in darkness when they’d stood on the bridge so that they hadn’t noticed it. Now light came through tiny windows set in its tower, and its great wheel was being turned by the race.

They’d pulled up. Sister Havis had stopped at a large stone hut built flush with the wall on this side and was unlocking its door.

The nun’s lantern showed the inside of the hut to be empty apart from a ladder and a few tools. The floor was slabbed with stone, but most of its space was taken up by a great curve of iron set with handles, like the lid of an immense pot.

Sister Havis stood back. “It will need two to lift it.” She had the same emotionless voice as her mother.

Aelwyn and Oswald exerted themselves to raise the lid, displaying the blackness of a hole and releasing a chill that was palpable even in the air of the hut, and with it a smell of straw and frozen meat.

The bishop had taken the lantern from the prioress and was down on his knees by the side of the hole. “Who built this?”

“We do not know, my lord. We discovered it and maintain it. Mother Abbess believes it was here long before our foundation.”

“The Romans, I wonder?” Rowley was intrigued. The ladder was carried over and put in place so that he could descend. His voice came up with an echo, still asking questions, Sister Havis answering them with detachment.

Yes, its position so far from the convent butchery was inconvenient, but presumably its builders had placed it here to be close to a part of the river that was embanked so that the chamber would suffer no erosion while yet benefiting from the cooling proximity of running water.

Yes, the convent still pickled and salted most of its animals after the Michaelmas slaughter, since even Godstow could not provide feed for them all during the winter, but freezing some carcasses enabled its people to have occasional fresh meat into the spring, or later.

Yes, of course, the mill pond over the way needed a very cold winter to turn to ice, but all winters were cold these days and the last freeze had been exceptional, providing them with sufficient frozen blocks to last until summer. Yes, his lordship would see a drain that took away any melted water.

“Marvelous.”

Adelia coughed with intent. Rowley’s head appeared. “What?”

“The obsequies, my lord.”

“Oh, of course.”

The body was lain on the slabs.

Rigor mortis had passed off, Adelia was interested to see, but that would be from the comparative warmth provided by the wrapping of straw and the shelter of the cart; down in that freezing hole, it would return.

The sure, strong voice of the Bishop of Saint Albans filled the hut. “Domine, Iesu Christe, Rex gloriae…Free the souls of all faithful departed from infernal punishment and the deep pit…nor let them fall into darkness, but may the sign-bearer Saint Michael lead them into the holy light which you promised…”

Adelia silently added her own requiem prayer: And may those who love you forgive me for what we do.

She went down the pit ahead of the body, joining Oswald and the bishop. A dreadful place, like the inside of an enormous brick egg insulated throughout by thick, netted straw over which more netting held the ice blocks. On their hooks, butchered sides of beef, lamb, venison, and pig, whitened by frost, hung so close together that she could not pass through without brushing her shoulders against them.

She found a space and straightened, to have her cap caught in the talons of game birds hanging from their own gallows.

Teeth chattering-and not just from the cold-she and the others guided the feet of the dead man as Aelwyn and Walt lowered him.

Together they laid him down under the birds, positioning him so that if there were drips, they would not fall on his face.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” When the others had climbed out of the hole, she stayed by the dead man for a moment to make him a promise. “Whether we catch your killers or not, I will not leave you here for long.”

It was almost too long for her; she was so cold she couldn’t manage the ladder and Mansur had to hoist her out.

The abbess gave up her house to Rowley, saying it was a relief to do so; its steep steps to the front door had become difficult for her. In that he was her superior in God, she could do no less, although it gave him access to the inner courtyard with its cloister, chapel, refectory, and nuns’ dormitory, which were otherwise barred to men overnight. Having taken a look at Father Paton and deciding that he wasn’t a sexual threat, either, she put the secretary in with his master.

Jacques, Walt, Oswald, and Aelwyn were accommodated in the male servants’ quarters.

Mansur was given a pleasant room in the men’s guesthouse. Gyltha, Adelia, the baby, and the dog were accommodated just as pleasantly in the females’ wing next to the church. Angled outside steps led up to each guest’s private door, which, since they were on the top floor, gave the two women a view westward over the track to Oxford and the abbey’s fields where they sloped down to the Thames.

“Duck down,” said Gyltha, examining a large bed. “An’ no fleas.” She investigated further. “And some saint’s put hot bricks to warm it.”

Adelia wanted nothing so much as to lie down on it and sleep, and, for a while, all three of them did just that.

They were awakened by bells, one of them tolling as if in their ear and setting the water ewer shivering in its basin on the room’s table.

Ready to flee, Adelia picked up Allie where she lay between her and Gyltha. “Is it a fire?”

Gyltha listened. The massive strokes were coming from the church tower nearby, and with them came the chime of other bells, tinnier and much farther away. “It’s Sunday,” she said.

“Oh, to hell. It’s not, is it?”

However, courtesy and Adelia’s consciousness of their indebtedness to the abbess demanded that they attend the morning worship to which Godstow was summoning its people.

And more than just its own people. The church in the outer courtyard was open to everybody, lay and religious-though not, of course, to infidels and the smellier dogs, thus leaving Mansur and Ward still in their beds-and today everybody within walking range was struggling through snow to get to it. The village of Wolvercote came across the bridge en masse, since its own church had been allowed to fall into ruin by the lord of the manor.

The attraction was the bishop, of course; he was as miraculous as an angel descended. A view of his cope and miter alone was worth the tithes everybody had to pay; he might be able to cure the little un’s cough; for sure he could bless the winter sowing. Several poorly looking milch cows and one limping donkey were already tied up by the water trough outside, awaiting his attention.

The clergy entered by their own separate doorway to take their seats in the glorious stalls of the choir under the church’s equally glorious fan-vaulted roof.

By virtue of his tonsure, Father Paton sat next to the nuns’ chaplain, a little dormouse of a man, opposite the rows of nuns that included among their black ranks two young women in white veils who had a tendency to giggle; they found Father Paton funny.

Most bishops used their homilies to wag a finger at sin in general, often in Norman French, their mother tongue, or in Latin on the principle that the less the congregation understood, the more in awe it would be.

Rowley’s was different, and in an English his flock could understand. “There’s some buggers are saying poor Lady Rosamund has died at the Queen Eleanor’s hand, which it is a wickedness and a lie, and you’ll oblige our Lord by giving it no credit.”

He left the pulpit to stride up and down the church, lecturing, hectoring. He was here to discover what or who had caused Rosamund’s death, he said, “For I do know she was dearly loved in these parts. Maybe ’twas an accident, maybe ’twasn’t, but if it weren’t, both king and queen’ll see to it the villain be punished according to law. In the meantime, ’tis beholden on us all to keep our counsel and the precious peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Then he kneeled down on the stones and straw to pray, and everyone in church kneeled with him.

They love him, Adelia thought. As quickly as that, they love him. Is it showmanship? No, it isn’t. He’s beyond that now. Beyond me, too.

When they rose, however, one man-the miller from across the bridge, judging from the spectral whiteness with which flour had ingrained his skin-raised a question. “Master, they say as how the queen be upsides with the king. Ain’t going to be no trouble twixt ’em, is there?”

He was backed by a murmur of anxiety. The civil war in which a king had fought a queen was only a generation in the past; nobody here wanted to see another.

Rowley turned on him. “Which is your missus?”

“This un.” The man jerked a thumb at the comfortable lady standing beside him.

“And a good choice you made there, Master Miller, as all can see. But tell me you ain’t been upsides with her along the years some’eres, or her ain’t been upsides with you, but you diddun start a war over it. Reckon as royalty ain’t no different.”

Amid laughter, he returned to his throne.

One of the white-veiled girls sang the responsory in honor of the bishop’s presence and sang it so exquisitely that Adelia, usually deaf to music, waited impatiently through the congregation’s answers until she sang again.

So it was nice to find the same young woman waiting for her in the great courtyard outside after the clergy had filed out. “May I come and see the baby? I love babies.”

“Of course. I must congratulate you on your voice; it is a joy to hear.”

“Thank you. I am Emma Bloat.”

“Adelia Aguilar.”

They fell into step, or, rather, Adelia stepped and Emma bounced. She was fifteen years old and in a state of exaltation over something. Adelia hoped it was not the bishop. “Are you an oblate?”

“Oh, no. Little Priscilla is the one taking the veil. I am to be married.”

“Good.”

“It is, isn’t it? Earthly love…” Emma twirled in sheer joie de vivre. “God must reckon it as high as heavenly love, mustn’t he, despite what Sister Mold says, or why does He make us feel like this?” She thumped the region of her heart.

“‘It is better to marry than to burn,’” quoted Adelia.

“Huh. What I say is, how did Saint Paul know? He didn’t do either.”

She was a refreshing child and she did love babies, or she certainly loved Allie, with whom she was prepared to play peep-bo longer than Adelia had believed possible without the brain giving way.

It seemed that the girl must have privilege of some kind, since she was not called back to join the sisters’ afternoon routine.

Wealth or rank? Adelia wondered. Or both?

She showed no more curiosity about this influx of strangers to the convent than if they had been toys provided for her amusement, though she demanded that they be curious about her. “Ask me about my husband-to-be, ask me, ask me.”

He was beautiful, apparently, oh so beautiful, gallant, wild with love for her, a writer of romantic poems that rivaled any Paris might have sent to Helen.

Gyltha raised her eyebrows to Adelia, who raised her own. This was happiness indeed, and unusual to be found in an arranged marriage. For arranged it was; Emma’s father, she told them, was a wine merchant in Oxford and was supplying the convent with the best Rhenish to pay for having her educated as befitted a nobleman’s wife. It was he who had procured the match.

At this point, Emma, who was standing by the window, laughed so much that she had to hold on to the mullion.

“Your intended’s a lord, then?” Gyltha asked, grinning.

The laughter went, and the girl turned to look out of the window as if its view could tell her something, and Adelia saw that when the exuberance of youth went, beauty would take its place.

“The lord of my heart,” Emma said.

It was difficult for the travelers to forgather in order to discuss and plan. Lenient as Godstow was, it could not tolerate the step of a Saracen into its inner courtyard. For the bishop to visit the women’s quarters was equally out of place. There was only the church, and even there a nun was always present at the main altar, interceding with God for the souls of such departed as had paid for the privilege. However, it had a side chapel devoted to Mary, deserted at night yet lit by candles-another gift from the dead that they might be remembered to the Holy Mother-and the abbess had given her permission for its use as a meeting place, as long as they were quiet about it.

The day’s large congregation had left no warmth behind. Blazing candles on the shrine sent out light and heat only a few feet, leaving the ogival space around them in icy shadow. Entering by a side door, Adelia saw a large figure kneeling before the altar, his cowled head bowed and the fingers of his hands interlaced so tightly that they resembled bare bone.

Rowley got up as the women entered. He looked tired. “You’re late.”

“I had to feed the baby,” Adelia told him.

From the main body of the church came the drone of a nun reading the commemorations from the convent register. She was being literal about it. “Lord, in Thy mercy, bless and recognize the soul of Thomas of Sandford, who did provide an orchard in Saint Giles’s, Oxford, to this convent and departed this life the day after Martinmas in the year of our Lord 1143. Sweet Jesus, in Thy Mercy, look kindly on the soul of Maud Halegod, who did give three silver marks…”

“Did Rosamund’s servant tell you anything?” Adelia whispered.

“Her?” The bishop didn’t bother to lower his voice. “The female’s rattle-headed; I’d have got more out of the bloody donkeys I’ve had to bless all bloody afternoon. She kept bleating. I swear, like a sheep.”

“You probably frightened her.” In full regalia, he’d have been overwhelming.

“Of course I didn’t frighten her. I was charming. The woman’s witless, I tell you. You see if you can get some sense out of her.”

“I shall.”

Gyltha had found some hassocks piled in a cupboard and was distributing them in a circle, where the candlelight fell on them, each one displaying the blazon of a noble family that didn’t want to dirty its knees when it came to church.

“Hassocks are sensible,” Adelia said, putting one under the sleeping Allie’s basket in order to keep it off the stones. Ward settled himself on another. “Why don’t the rich endow hassocks for the poor? They’d be remembered longer.”

“The rich don’t want us comfortable,” Gyltha said. “Ain’t good for us. Give us ideas above our station. Where’s that old Arab?”

“The messenger’s fetching him.”

He came, having to stoop through the side door, wrapped in a cloak, Jacques behind him.

“Good,” Rowley said. “You can go, Jacques.”

“Ummm.” The young man shifted in complaint.

Adelia took pity on him. Messengers had an unenviable and lonely job, spending their time crisscrossing the country with a horse as their only companion. Their masters were hard on them: letters to be delivered quickly, replies brought back even quicker; excuses, such as bad weather, falls, difficult country, or getting lost, discounted in favor of the suspicion that the servant had been wasting his time and his employer’s money in some tavern.

Rowley, she thought, was being particularly hard on this one; there was no reason why the young man should not be included in their discussions. She suspected that Jacques’s sin lay in the fact that, though he wore the sober Saint Albans livery, he compensated for his lack of height by wearing raised boots and a high plume in his hat, which led to the suspicion that he was following the trend introduced by Queen Eleanor and her court for males as well as women to subscribe to fashion-an idea welcomed by the young generation but condemned as effete by men, like Rowley, like Walt and Oswald, whose choice of clothing material had always been either leather or chain mail.

Walt had been heard to describe the messenger, not inaccurately, as looking like “a stalk of celery wi’ roots attached,” and Rowley had grumbled to Adelia that he feared his messenger was “greenery-yellery” and “not good, plain old Norman English,” both epithets he reserved for men he regarded as effeminate. “I shall have to send him away. The boy even wears scent. I can’t have my missives delivered by a popinjay.”

This, thought Adelia, from a man whose ceremonial robes dazzled the eye and took half an hour to put on.

She decided to intercede. “Are we taking Master Jacques with us to Rosamund’s tower tomorrow?”

“Of course we are.” Rowley was still irritable. “I may need to send messages.”

“Then he’ll know as much as we know, my lord. He already does.”

“Oh, very well.”

From the altar beyond the screen that separated them, the ceaseless muttering of prayer for the dead went on as, with different nuns taking up the task, it would go on all night.

“…of your mercy, the soul of Thomas Hookeday, hayward of this parish, for the sixpence he did endow…”

Rowley produced the saddle roll that had belonged to the dead man on the bridge. “Hasn’t been time to look through it yet.” He unbuckled the straps and put it on the floor to unroll it. With Jacques standing behind them, the four sat round and considered its contents.

Which were few. A leather bottle of ale. Half a cheese and a loaf neatly wrapped in cloth. A hunting horn-odd equipment for a man traveling without companions or dogs. A spare cloak with fur trimming, surprisingly small for what had been a tall man-again, carefully folded.

Wherever the youngster had been heading, he was banking on finding food and lodging there; the bread and cheese wouldn’t have sustained him very far.

And there was a letter. It appeared to have been pushed just under the flap between the buckles of the leather straps that secured the roll.

Rowley picked it up and smoothed it out.

“‘To Talbot of Kidlington,’” he read. “‘That the Lord and His angels bless you on this Day that enters you into Man’s estate and keep you from the Path of Sin and all unrighteousness is the dearest hope of your affct cousin, Wlm Warin, gentleman-at-law, who hereby sends: two silver marks as an earnest of your inheritance, the rest to be Claimed when we do meet. Written this day of Our Lord, the sixteenth before the Kalends of January, at my place of business next Saint Michael at the North Gate of Oxford.’”

He looked up. “Well, there we are, then. Now we know our body’s name.”

Adelia nodded slowly. “Hmm.”

“What’s wrong with that? The boy’s got a name, a twenty-first birthday, and an affectionate cousin with an address. Plenty for you to work on. What he hasn’t got is two silver marks. I imagine the thieves took those.”

Adelia noted the “you”; this was to be her business, not the bishop’s. “Don’t you think it odd,” she asked, “if the family arms on his purse were not to tell us who he was, here is a letter that does. It gives us almost too much information. What affectionate writer calls his cousin Talbot of Kidlington rather than just Talbot?”

Rowley shrugged. “A perfectly standard superscription.”

Adelia took the letter from him. “And it’s on vellum. Expensive for such a brief, personal note. Why didn’t Master Warin use rag paper?”

“All lawyers use vellum or parchment. They think paper is infra dignitatem.”

But Adelia mused on. “And it’s crumpled, just shoved between the buckles. Look, it’s torn on one of them. Nobody treats vellum like that-it can always be scraped down to use again.”

“Perhaps the lad was in a rush when he received it, stuffed it away quickly. Or he was angry because he was expecting more than two marks? Or he doesn’t give an owl’s hoot for vellum. Which”-the bishop was losing his patience-“at this moment, I don’t, either. What is your point, mistress?”

Adelia considered for a moment.

Whether the body in the icehouse was that of Talbot of Kidlington or not, when alive it had belonged to a neat man; his clothing had told her that. So did the care he’d expended on wrapping the contents of his saddle roll. People with such tidy habits-and Adelia was one of their number-did not carelessly thrust a document on vellum into an aperture with the flat of the hand, as this had been.

“I don’t think he even saw this letter,” she said. “I think the men who killed him put it there.”

“For the Lord’s sake,” Rowley hissed at her, “this is overelaboration. Adelia, highway villains do not endow their victim with correspondence. What are you saying? It’s a forgery to put us off the track? Talbot of Kidlington isn’t Talbot of Kidlington? The belt and the purse belong to someone else entirely?”

“I don’t know.” But something about the letter was wrong.

Arrangements were made for the next day’s excursion. Adelia would accompany bishop, messenger, groom, and one of the men-at-arms on a ride upriver, using the towpath to Rosamund’s tower while Mansur and the other man-at-arms would travel by water, bringing a barge on which to carry back the corpse.

While discussion went on, Adelia took the opportunity to examine the blazons on all the hassocks. None of them matched the device on the young man’s purse or belt.

Rowley was talking to Gyltha. “You must stay here, mistress. We can’t take the baby with us.”

Adelia looked up. “I’m not leaving her behind.”

He said, “You’ll have to, it won’t be a family outing.” He took Mansur by the arm. “Come along, my friend, let’s see what the convent has in the way of boats.” They went out, the messenger with them.

“I’m not leaving her,” Adelia shouted after him, causing a momentary pause in the recital of souls from beyond the screen. She turned to Gyltha. “How dare he. I won’t.”

Gyltha pressed on Adelia’s shoulders to force her down onto a hassock, then sat beside her. “He’s right.”

“He’s not. Suppose we get cut off by snow, by anything? She needs to be fed.”

“Then I’ll see as she is.” Gyltha took Adelia’s hand and bounced it gently. “It’s time, girl,” she said. “Time she was weaned proper. You’re a’drying up; you know it, the little un knows it.”

Adelia was hearing the truth; Gyltha never told her anything else. In fact, the weaning process had been going on for some weeks as her breast milk diminished, both women chewing food to a pap and supplementing it with cow’s milk to spoon into Allie’s eager mouth.

If breast-feeding, which the childless Adelia had considered would be an oozing embarrassment, had proved to be one of life’s natural pleasures, it had also been the excuse to have her child always with her. For motherhood, while another joy, had burdened her with a tearing and unexpected anxiety, as if her senses had been transferred into the body of her daughter, and, by a lesser extension, into that of all children. Adelia, who’d once considered anyone below the age of reason to be alien and had treated them as such, was now open to their grief, their slightest pain, any unhappiness.

Allie suffered few of these emotions; she was a sturdy baby, and gradually Adelia had become aware that the agony was for herself, for the two-day-old creature that had been abandoned by an unknown parent on a rocky slope in Italy’s Campania nearly thirty years before. During her growing up it had not mattered; an incident, even amusing in that the couple who’d discovered her had commemorated an event all three had considered fortunate by giving her Vesuvia as one of her names. Childless, loving, clever, eccentric, Signor and Signora Aguilar, both doctors trained in the liberal tradition of Salerno’s great School of Medicine, he a Jew, she a Catholic Christian, had found in Adelia not only a beloved daughter but a brain that superseded even their intelligence, and had educated it accordingly. No, abandonment hadn’t mattered. It had, in fact, turned out to be the greatest gift that the real, unknown, desperate, sorrowing, or uncaring mother could have bestowed on her child.

Until that child had given birth to a baby of her own.

Then it came. Fear like a typhoon that wouldn’t stop blowing, not just fear that Allie would die but fear that she herself would die and leave the child without the mercy that had been bestowed on her. Better they both die together.

Oh, God, if the poisoner was not content merely with Rosamund’s death…or if the killers from the bridge were waiting en route…or if she should leave her child in a Godstow suddenly overwhelmed by fire…

This was obsession, and Adelia had just enough sense to know that, if it persisted, it would damage both herself and Allie.

“It’s time,” Gyltha said again, and since Gyltha, most reliable of women, said it was, then it was.

But she resented the ease with which Rowley demanded a separation that would cause her grief and, however unfounded, fear as well. “It’s not up to him to tell me to leave her behind. I hate leaving her, I hate it.”

Gyltha shrugged. “His child, too.”

“You wouldn’t think so.”

The messenger’s voice came from the door. “My apologies, mistress, but his lordship asks that you will interview Bertha.”

“Bertha?”

“Lady Rosamund’s servant, mistress. The mushrooming one.”

“Oh, yes.”

Apart from the unremitting prayers for the dead in the church and the canonical hours, the convent had shut down, leaving it in a total, moonless black. The compass of light from Jacques’s lantern lit only the bottom of walls and a few feet of pathway lined by snow as he led the two women to their quarters. There Adelia kissed her baby good night and left Gyltha to put her to bed.

She and the messenger went on alone, leaving the outer courtyard for open ground. A faint smell suggested that somewhere nearby were vegetable gardens, rotted now by the frost.

“Where are you taking me?” Her voice went querulous into the blackness.

“The cowshed, I’m afraid, mistress.” Jacques was apologetic. “The girl’s hidden herself there. The abbess put her to the kitchens, but the cooks refused to work with her, seeing it was her hand that fed the poison to the lady Rosamund. The nuns have tried talking to her but they say it’s difficult to get sense from the poor soul, and she dreads the arrival of the lady’s housekeeper.”

The messenger chatted on, eager to prove himself worthy of inclusion into his bishop’s strange, investigative inner circle.

“About the blazon on the poor young man’s purse, mistress. It might profit you to consult Sister Lancelyne. She keeps the convent’s cartulary and register, and has a record of the device of every family who’s made a gift at some time or another.”

He’d been making good use of his time. It was a messenger’s attribute to persuade himself into the good books of the servants of households he visited. It got him better food and drink before he had to set off again.

Walls closed in again. Adelia’s boots splashed through the slush of what, in daytime, must be much-used lanes. Her nose registered that they were passing a bakehouse, now a kitchen, a laundry, all silent and invisible in the darkness.

More open land. More slush, but here and there footprints in a bank of snow where someone had stepped off the path.

Menace.

It came at her, unseen, unaccountable, but so strong that she hunched and stood still under its attack as if she were back in the alleys of Salerno and had seen the shadow of a man with a knife.

The messenger stopped with her. ”What is it, mistress?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.” There were footprints in the snow, valid, explicable footprints no doubt, but for her, remembering those on the bridge, they pointed to death.

She forced herself to trudge on.

The acrid stink of hot iron and a remnant of warmth on the air told her they were passing a smithy, its fire banked down for the night. Now a stable and the smell of horse manure that, as they walked on, became bovine-they had reached the cowshed.

Jacques heaved open one of the double doors to reveal a wide, bespattered aisle between partitioned stalls, most of which were empty. Few beasts anywhere survived the Michaelmas cull-there was never enough fodder to see herds through the winter-but farther up the aisle, the lantern shone on the crusted backsides and tails of the cows that had been left alive to provide winter milk.

“Where is she?”

“They said she was here. Bertha,” Jacques called. “Bertha.”

From somewhere in the dark at the far end of the shed came a squeak and rustle of straw as if an extra-large mouse were making for its hole.

Jacques lit their way up the aisle and shone the lantern into the last of the stalls before hanging it from the hook of an overhead beam. “She’s there, I think, mistress.” He stood back so Adelia could see inside it.

There was a big pile of straw against the stall’s back wall. Adelia addressed it. “Bertha? I mean you no harm. Please talk to me.”

She had to say it several times before there was a heave and a face was framed in the straw. At first, with the lantern sending downward light on it, Adelia thought it was a pig’s, then saw that it belonged to a girl with a nose so retroussé as to present only nostrils, giving it the appearance of a snout. Small, almost lashless eyes fixed on Adelia’s face. The wide mouth moved and produced sound high up the scale. “Non me faux,” it sounded like. “Non me faux, non me faux.”

Adelia turned back to Jacques. “Is she French?”

“Not as far as I know, mistress. I think she’s saying it was not her fault.”

The bleat changed. “Donagemme.”

“‘Don’t let her get me,’” Jacques translated.

“Dame Dakers?” Adelia asked.

Bertha hunched in terror. “Turmeinamouse.”

“‘She’ll turn me into a mouse,’” Jacques said helpfully.

The irresistible thought came, shamefully, that in the case of this child, the dame’s powers to turn her into an animal would not be stretched very far.

“Antrappi.” Bertha was becoming less frightened and more confidential, poking forward now to show a thin upper neck and body under head and hair colored the same as the straw that framed them. Her gaze became fixed on Adelia’s neck.

“‘And catch I in a trap,’” Jacques said.

Adelia was getting the hang of Bertha’s speech. Also, she had become angry, as she always did at the suggestion of magic, appalled that this girl should be terrorized by black superstition. “Sit up,” she said.

The porcine little eyes blinked and Bertha sat up instantly, spilling straw. She was used to being bullied.

“Now,” Adelia said, more quietly, “nobody blames you for what happened, but you must tell me how it came about.”

Bertha leaned forward and poked at Adelia’s necklet. “What be that purty thing?”

“It’s a cross. Haven’t you seen one before?”

“Lady Ros do have similar, purtier nor that. What be for? Magic?” This was awful. Had nobody taught the girl Christianity?

Adelia said, “As soon as I can, I shall buy you one of your own and explain it to you. Now, though, you must explain things to me. Will you do that?”

Bertha nodded, her eyes still on the silver cross.

So it began. It took infinite labor on Adelia’s part and wearisome, evasive repetition on Bertha’s, pursuing the theme that it wasn’t her fault, before any relevant information could be teased from her. The girl was so ignorant, so credulous, that Adelia’s opinion of Rosamund became very low-no servant should be so deprived of education. Fair Rosamund, she thought. Not much fairness in the neglect of this sad little thing.

It was difficult to estimate her age; Bertha herself didn’t know it. Between sixteen and twenty, Adelia guessed, half-starved and as unaware of how the world wagged as any mole in its run.

Jacques, unnoticed, had slid a milking stool against her hocks, allowing her to sit so that she and Bertha were on a level. He remained standing directly behind her in shadow, saying not a word.

Ever since she’d heard of Rosamund’s death, Adelia had believed that what she would eventually uncover was the tale of a sad accident.

It wasn’t. As Bertha gained confidence and Adelia understanding, the story that emerged showed that Bertha had been the accomplice, albeit unwittingly, to deliberate murder.

On the fatal day, she said, she’d gone into the forest surrounding Wormhold Tower to gather kindling, not mushrooms, pulling a sledge behind her to pile it with such dead branches as could be reached with a crook.

Lowest of all Rosamund’s servants, it had already been a bad morning for her. Dame Dakers had walloped her for dropping a pot and told her that Lady Rosamund was sick of her and intended to send her away, which, Bertha being without family to turn to, would have meant having to tramp the countryside begging for food.

“Her’s a dragon,” Bertha whispered, looking round and up in case Dame Dakers had flown in, flapping her wings, to perch on one of the cowshed’s beams. “Us calls her Dragon Dakers.”

Miserably, Bertha had gathered so much fuel-afraid of Dragon Dakers’s wrath if she didn’t-that, having tied the bundled wood to the sledge, she found it impossible to pull, at which point she had sat down on the ground and bawled her distress to the trees.

“And then her come up.”

“Who came?”

“Her did. Old woman.”

“Had you ever seen her before?”

“’Course not.” Bertha regarded the question as an insult. “Her didn’t come from our parts. Second cook to Queen Eleanor, she was. The queen. Traveled everywhere with un.”

“That’s what she told you? She worked for Queen Eleanor?”

“Her did.”

“What did this old woman look like?”

“Like a old woman.”

Adelia took a breath and tried again. “How old? Describe her. Well-dressed? In rags? What sort of face? What sort of voice?”

But Bertha, lacking both observation and vocabulary, was unable to answer these questions. “Her was ugly, but her was kind,” she said. It was the only description she could give, kindness being so rare in Bertha’s life that it was remarkable.

“In what way was she kind?”

“Her gave I them mushrooms, didn’t her? Magic, they was. Said they’d make Lady Ros look on I with”-Bertha’s unfortunate nose had wrinkled in an effort to recall the word used-“favor.”

“She said your mistress would be pleased with you?”

“Her did.”

It took time, but eventually something of the conversation that had taken place in the forest between Bertha and the old woman was reconstructed.

“That’s what I do for my lady, Queen Eleanor,” the old woman had said. “I do give her a feast of these here mushrooms, and her do look on me with favor.”

Bertha had inquired eagerly whether they also worked on less-exalted mistresses.

“Oh, yes, even better.”

“Like, if your mistress were going to send you off, she wouldn’t?”

“Send you off? Promote you more like.”

Then the old woman had added, “Tell you what I’ll do, Bertha, my duckling, I like your face, so I’ll let you have my mushrooms to cook for your lady. Fond of mushrooms, is she?”

“Dotes on ’em.”

“There you are, then. You cook her these and be rewarded. Only you must do it right away now.”

Amazed, Adelia wondered for a moment if this was a fairy tale that Bertha had concocted in order to conceal her own guilt. Then she abandoned the thought; nobody had ever bothered to tell Bertha fairy tales in which mysterious old women offered girls their heart’s desire-or any fairy tales at all. Bertha was incapable of concoction, anyway.

So that day in the forest, now eager and full of strength, Bertha had tied the basket of mushrooms to the wood on her sledge and dragged both back to Wormhold Tower.

Which was almost deserted. That, Adelia thought, was significant. Dame Dakers had left for the day to go to a hiring fair in Oxford in order to find a new cook-cooks, it seemed, never endured her strictures for long and were constantly leaving. The other staff, free of the housekeeper’s eye, had taken themselves off, leaving Fair Rosamund virtually alone.

So, in an empty kitchen, Bertha had set to work. The amount of fungi had been enough for two meals, and Bertha had divided them, thinking to leave some for tomorrow. She’d put half into a skillet with butter, a pinch of salt, a touch of wild garlic, and a sprinkling of parsley, warmed them over a flame until the juices ran, and then taken the dish up to the solar where Rosamund sat at her table, writing a letter.

“Her could write, you know,” Bertha said in wonder.

“And she ate the mushrooms?”

“Gobbled ’em.” The girl nodded. “Greedy like.”

The magic had worked. Lady Rosamund, most unusually, had smiled on Bertha, thanked her, said she was a good girl.

Later, the convulsions had begun…

Even now, Adelia discovered, Bertha did not suspect the crone in the forest of treachery. “Accident,” she said. “Weren’t the old un’s fault. A wicked mushroom did get into that basket by mistake.”

There was no point in arguing, but there had been no mistake. In the selection Bertha had saved and Rowley had shown Adelia, the Death Cap was as numerous as any other species-and carefully mixed in among them.

Bertha, however, refused to believe ill of someone who’d been nice to her. “Weren’t her fault, weren’t mine. Accident.”

Adelia sat back on her stool to consider. Such an undoubted murder, only Bertha could believe it an accident, only Bertha could think that royal servants roamed the forest bestowing gifts of enchanted mushrooms on anyone they met. There had been meticulous planning. The old woman, whoever she was, had spun a web to catch the particular fly that was Bertha on the particular day when Rosamund’s dragon, Dakers, had been absent from her mistress’s side.

Which argued that the old woman had been privy to the movements of Rosamund’s household, or instructed by someone who was.

Rowley’s right, Adelia thought, someone wanted Rosamund dead and the queen implicated. If Eleanor had ordered it done, she’d hardly have chosen an old woman who’d mention her name. No, it hadn’t been Eleanor. Whoever had done it had hated the queen even more than Rosamund. Or maybe merely wanted to enrage her husband against her and thereby plunge England into conflict. Which they might.

The shed had become quiet. Bertha’s mumbles that it wasn’t her fault had faded away, leaving only the sound of cows’ chewing and the slither of hay as they pulled more from their mangers.

“For God’s sake,” Adelia asked Bertha desperately, “didn’t you notice anything about the old woman?”

Bertha thought, shaking her head. Then she seemed puzzled. “Smelled purty,” she said.

“She smelled pretty? In what way pretty?”

“Purty.” The girl was crawling forward now, her nose questing like a shrew’s. “Like you.”

“She smelled like me?”

Bertha nodded.

Soap. Good scented soap, Adelia’s one luxury, used only two hours ago in the allover wash to cleanse her from her travels. Bars of it, made with lye, olive oil, and essence of flowers, were sent to her once a year by her foster mother from Rome-Adelia had complained in one of her letters of the soap in England, where the process was based on beef tallow, making its users smell as if they were ready for the oven.

“Did she smell like flowers?” she asked. “Roses? Lavender? Chamomile?” And she knew it was useless. Even if Bertha was conversant with these plants, she would know them only by local names unfamiliar to Adelia.

It had been a gain, though. No ordinary old woman gathering mushrooms in a forest would smell of perfumed soap, even supposing she used soap at all.

Rising to her feet, Adelia said, “If you smell her scent again on anybody else, will you tell me?”

Bertha nodded. Her eyes were fixed on the cross at Adelia’s throat, as if, ignorant of its meaning, it still spoke to her of hope.

And what hope has she, poor thing?

Sighing, Adelia unfastened the chain from her neck and slid it with its cross into Bertha’s dirty little hand, closing her fingers over it. “Keep this until I can buy you one of your own,” she said.

It cost her to do it, not because of the cross’s symbolism-Adelia had been exposed to too many religions to put all her faith in a single one-but because it had been given to her by Margaret, her old nurse, a true Christian, who had died on the journey to England.

But I have known love. I have my child, an occupation, friends.

Bertha, who had none of these things, clasped the cross and, bleating with pleasure, dived back into the straw with it.

As they walked back through the night, Jacques said, “Do you believe that little piggy can sniff out your truffle for you, mistress?”

“It’s a long shot,” Adelia admitted, “but Bertha’s nose is probably the best detector we have. If she should smell the old woman’s scent again, it will be on someone who buys foreign soap and can tell us who their supplier is, who, in turn, could provide us with a list of customers.”

“Clever.” The messenger’s voice was admiring.

After a while, he said, “Do you think the queen was involved?”

“Somebody wants us to think so.”