The Serpent’s Tale

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.”

THREE

No question now of the bishop crossing from England to Normandy in order to calm a turbulent king. The king’s beloved was dead, and the king would be coming to England himself, riding the air like a demon to ravage and burn-maybe, in his rage, to kill his own wife if he could find her.

So, at dawn, the bishop rode, too, another demon loose on the world, to be ahead of the king, to find the queen and get her away, to be on the spot, to locate the real culprit, to be able to say: “My lord, hold your hand; this is Rosamund’s killer.”

To avoid Armageddon.

With the bishop went those for his purpose, a pitiful few compared to his lordship’s usual train: two men-at- arms, a groom, a secretary, a messenger, a carriage, horses, and remounts. Also an Arab doctor, a dog, two women, and a baby-and to hell if they couldn’t keep up.

They kept up. Just. Their carriage, Father Paton’s “conveyance,” was splendidly carved, enclosed against the weather by purple waxed cloth with matching cushions among the straw inside, but it was not intended for speed. After three hours of it, Gyltha said that if she stayed in the bugger much longer she’d lose her teeth from rattling, and the poor baby its brains.

So they transferred to horses, young Allie being placed and padded into a pannier like a grub in a cocoon; Ward, the dog, was stuffed less gently into the other. The change was made quickly to stay up with the bishop, who wouldn’t wait for them.

Jacques the messenger was sent ahead to prepare the bishop’s palace at Saint Albans for their brief stay overnight and, then, next day, to the Barleycorn at Aylesbury for another.

It was cold, becoming colder the farther west they went, as if Henry Plantagenet’s icy breath were on their neck and getting closer.

They didn’t reach the Barleycorn, because that was the day it began to snow, and they left the roads for the Icknield Way escarpment, where avenues of trees and the chalk under their horses’ hooves made the going easier and therefore faster.

There were no inns on these high tracks, and the bishop refused to waste time by descending to find one. “We’ll make camp,” he said.

When, eventually, he allowed them to dismount, Adelia’s muscles protested as she struggled to get off her horse. She looked with anxiety toward Gyltha, who was struggling off hers. “Are you surviving?” Tough as leather the fenwoman might be, but she was still a grandmother and entitled to better treatment than this.

“I got sores where I wou’n’t like to say.”

“So have I.” And stinging as if from acid.

The only one looking worse than they did was Father Paton, whose large breakfast at Saint Albans had been jolting out of him, amidst groans, for most of the way. “Shouldn’t have gobbled it,” Gyltha told him.

Baby Allie, on the other hand, had taken no harm from the journey; indeed, snuggled in her pannier, she appeared to have enjoyed it, despite her hurried feeds when Bishop Rowley had permitted a stop to change horses.

Carrying her with them, the two women retired to the cart and ministered to their wounds with salves from Adelia’s medicine chest. “The which I ain’t letting Father Fustilugs have any,” Gyltha said vengefully of Father Paton. She’d taken against him.

“What about Mansur? He’s not used to this, either.”

“Great lummox…” Gyltha liked to hide her delight in and love for the Arab. “He’d not say a word if his arse was on fire.”

Which was true; Mansur cultivated stoicism to the point of impassivity. His sale as a little boy to Byzantine monks who’d preserved the beauty of his treble singing voice by castration had taught him the futility of complaining. In all the years since he’d found sanctuary with Adelia’s foster parents and become her bodyguard and friend, she’d never heard him utter a querulous sentence. Not that he uttered many words in strange company anyway; the English found him and his Arab dress outlandish enough without the addition of a child’s squeaky speaking voice issuing from a man six feet tall with the face of an eagle.

Oswald and Aelwyn, the men-at-arms, and Walt, the groom, were uneasy in their dealings with him, apparently crediting him with occult powers. It was Adelia they treated like dirt-though never if Rowley was looking. At first she’d put their discourtesies down to the rigors of the journey, but gradually they became too marked to be