The Serpent’s Tale

shouted. “Little un’s due a feed, and we’m dyin’ of frostbite.”

Adelia ignored her. She still didn’t feel the cold. “Two men,” she said, “and they are poor, judging from their footwear. Two men kill our rider. Granted, they take the money from his purse, but they leave the purse, a good one that has his family crest on it. They leave his boots, his cloak, the silver buckle, his fine horse. What thief does that?”

“Perhaps they were disturbed,” Rowley said.

“Who disturbs them? Not us. They are long gone before we come up. They had time to strip this poor soul of everything he…had. They do not. Why, Rowley?”

The bishop thought it through. “They want him found.”

Adelia nodded. “It is vital to them.”

“They want him to be identified.”

Adelia’s exhaled breath was a stream of satisfaction. “Exactly. It must be known who he is and that he is dead.”

“I see.” Rowley considered. “Hence the suggestion that we hide his body. I don’t like it, though.”

“But that will bring them back, Rowley,” Adelia said, and for the first time she touched him, a tug on his sleeve. “They’ve taken pains to have this poor young man’s death declared to the world. They’ll come back to find out why it isn’t. We can be waiting for them.”

Mansur nodded. “Some fiend intends to profit by this killing, Allah ruin him.”

Adelia jiggled the bishop’s sleeve again. “But not if the boy seems merely to have gone away, just disappeared.”

Rowley was doubtful. “There’ll be someone at home, worrying for him.”

“If so, they’ll want his murderers found.”

“He ought to be buried with decency.”

“Not yet.”

Pulling his arm from her grasp, the bishop went away from her. Adelia watched him go to the parapet of the bridge and lean over it, looking at the roaring water that showed white in the moonlight.

He hates it when I do this, she thought. He was prepared to love the woman but not the doctor. Yet it was the doctor he invited along, and he must bear the consequences. I have a duty to that dead boy, and I will not abandon it.

Now she was cold.

“Very well.” He turned round. “You may be fortunate in that Godstow possesses an icehouse. Famous for it.”

While the body was being wrapped in its cloak and its possessions collected, Adelia went to the fire to feed her baby.

The Bishop of Saint Albans gathered his men round him to tell them what Dr. Mansur had discovered from reading the signs in the snow.

“With the mercy of God, we may hope to catch these killers. Until then, not one of you-I say again, nobody-is to mention what we have seen this night. We shall keep this body reverently, but secretly, hidden in order to find out who comes back for it-and may God have mercy on their souls, for we shall not.”

It was well done. Rowley had fought in Outremer on Crusade and found that men responded better for knowing what their commander was about than those merely given reasonless commands.

He drew an assenting growl from the circle about him, the messenger’s particularly fervent-he and the others spent much of their lives on the road, and they saw the rider on the bridge as any one of themselves fallen to the predators infesting the highways. As Good Samaritans, they had been too late to save the traveler’s life, but they could at least bring his killers to justice.

Only Father Paton’s frown suggested that he was assessing how much the corpse was going to cost the ecclesiastical purse.

Baring their heads, the men took the body up and put it in the cart. With everybody walking beside it, leading their horses, they crossed the bridge to Godstow nunnery.

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