The Serpent’s Tale

“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