The Serpent’s Tale

disregarded. Unless the bishop or Mansur was nearby, she was never assisted onto a horse nor down, and the occasions when she went off into the trees to answer a call of nature were accompanied by low, offensive whistles. Once or twice she heard Ward yelp as if he’d been kicked.

Nor had she and Gyltha been provided with sidesaddles. Rowley had ordered them, but somehow, in the haste, they’d been forgotten, leaving the women perforce to ride astride, an unseemly posture for a lady though, actually, one that Adelia preferred because she considered sidesaddles injurious to the spine.

Nevertheless, the omission had been uncivil and, she thought, intended.

To church servants like these, she was a harlot, of course; either the bishop’s trull or the Saracen’s, perhaps both. For them it was bad enough to be chasing across country in bad weather to attend the funeral of a king’s mistress without dragging another whore along with them.

“What’s she with us for?”

“God knows. Clever with her brains, so they say.”

“Clever with her quim more like. Is that his lordship’s bastard?”

“Could be anybody’s.”

The exchange had been made where she could overhear it.

Damn it, this would harm him. Rowley had been appointed by Henry II against the wishes of the Church, which had wanted its own man to fill the post of Saint Albans and still hoped for a reason to dismiss the king’s candidate. Knowledge that he’d fathered an illegitimate child would give his enemies their chance.

Damn the Church, Adelia thought. Our affair was over before he became a bishop. Damn it for imposing impossible celibacy on its people. Damn it for hypocrisy-Christendom was littered with priests wallowing in varieties of sin. How many of them were condemned?

And damn it for its hatred of women-an abuse of half the world’s inhabitants, so that those who refused to be penned into its sheepfold were condemned as harlots and heretics and witches.

Damn you, she thought of the bishop’s men, are you so innocent? Are all your children born in wedlock? Which of you jumped over the broom stick with a woman rather than legally marry her?

And damn you, Bishop Rowley, for placing me in this situation.

Then, because she was feeding Allie, she damned them all again for making her angry enough to damn them.

Father Paton escaped her curses; unlovable as he was, he at least treated her like he treated everybody else- as a sexless and unfortunate expense.

The messenger, Jacques, a gauche, large-eared, somewhat overeager young man, seemed more kindly inclined to her than the others, but the bishop kept him on the gallop with taking messages and preparing the way ahead, so she saw little of him.

With imperceptible difference, the Icknield Way became the Ridgeway. The cold was gaining an intensity that leeched strength out of humans and horses, but they were at least approaching the Thames and the Abbey of Godstow, which stood on one of its islands.

Jacques rejoined the company, appearing from the trees ahead like a mounted white bear. He shook himself free of snow as he bowed to Rowley. “Abbess Mother Edyve sends greetings to your lordship and her joy to accommodate you and your party whenever you will. Also, I was to say that she expects the body of the Lady Rosamund to be brought to the convent by river today.”

Rowley said heavily, “So she is dead.”

“I trust so, my lord, for the nuns intend to bury her.”

His bishop glared at him. “Go back there. Tell them we should arrive tonight and that I am bringing a Saracen doctor to examine Lady Rosamund’s corpse and determine how she died.” He turned to Adelia and said in Latin, “You’ll want to see the body, won’t you?”

“I suppose so.” Though what it could tell her, she wasn’t sure.

The messenger stopped long enough to stuff bread, cheese, and a flask of ale into his saddlebag before remounting.

“Shouldn’t you rest first?” Adelia asked him.

“Don’t mind for me, mistress. I sleep in the saddle.”

She wished she could. To stay in it at all took strength. Father Paton’s provision of cloaks had been of the cheapest wool and, wearing them, she, Gyltha, and Mansur would have frozen to death on horseback if it hadn’t been for the rough mantles of beaver fur they had brought with them. The fenland was full of beaver, and these were gifts from a grateful trapper Adelia had nursed through pneumonia.

That afternoon the travelers descended from the hills to the village of Thame and the road leading to Oxford. It was getting dark, still snowing, but the bishop said, “Not far now. We’ll press on with lanterns.”

It was terrible going; the horses had to be rugged even though they were kept moving. Soon they had to be fitted with headbands that fringed their eyes, usually a device to keep off flies, so they would not be blinded by the thick flakes that swirled and stuck to the lashes.

It was impossible to see beyond a yard. If the road hadn’t run between hedges, they would have lost their way, lanterns or no lanterns, and ended in a field or river. When the hedges disappeared at a crossroads, Rowley had to call a halt until they found the right track again, which meant the men had to search for it, all the time calling to each other in case any one of them blundered away-an error that, in this cold, would cost him his life.

For the baby’s sake as well as their own, the women were forced to reenter the carriage and stay there. Father Paton had already done so, complaining that if he stayed in the cold he would lose the use of his secretarial writing hand.

They hooked one of the lanterns to the arch over their heads and began heaping straw to make a bed, tucking Allie between them to benefit from the heat of their bodies. The cold lanced in like needles through the eyelets where the canopy was tied to its struts, so icy that it nullified the smell of the straw and even of the dog at their feet.

They were going at walking pace-Mansur was leading the horses-but deep pits in the track concealed by snow caused the carriage to fall and tip with bone-jarring suddenness so that rest was impossible. In any case, anxiety for what the others were suffering outside precluded sleep.

Gyltha said admiringly of Rowley, “He ain’t a’going to stop, is he?”

“No.” This was a man who’d pursued a murderer across the deserts of Outremer. An English blizzard wasn’t going to defeat him. Adelia said, “Have no concern for him: He’s showing none for…” There was a lurch of the carriage, and she grabbed at a strut with her right hand and her baby with her left to stop them being thrown from one side to the other. The lantern swung through an arc of one hundred eighty degrees, and Gyltha lunged upward to snuff out its candle in case it set fire to the canopy.

“…us,” Adelia finished.

In the darkness and at an angle, they could hear Father Paton praying for deliverance while, outside, screeching Arabic curses rained on horses that refused to pull. One or another was effective; after another grinding jerk, the carriage went on.

“You see,” came Gyltha’s voice, as if resuming a conversation, “Rowley, he remembers the war betwixt Matilda and Stephen. He’s a youngster compared to me, but he was born into it, and his parents, they’d have lived through it, like I did. King Stephen, he died natural in his bed. And Queen Matilda, she’s still going strong. But the war betwixt them…weren’t so for us commoners. We died over and over. It was like…like we was all tossed in the air and stayed there with nothing to hold to. The law went, ever’thing went. My pa, he was dragged off his fields one day to build a castle for Hugh Bigod. Never came back. Took three years a’fore we heard he was crushed flat when a stone fell. We near starved without un.”

Adelia heard the deep intake of breath, heavier than a sigh. Simple sentences, she thought, but what weight they carried.

Gyltha said, “We lost our Em an’ all. Older than me she was, about eleven. Some mercenaries came through and Ma ran with my brothers and me to hide in the fen, but they caught Em. She was screaming when they galloped off with her, I can hear her now. Never did find out what happened, but she was another as didn’t come back.”

It was a lecture. Adelia had heard Gyltha talk about the thirteen-year war before, but only in general terms, never like this; as witness to its chaos, the old woman was calling up specters that still gave her pain. Feudalism