The Serpent’s Tale

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…”