The Serpent’s Tale

Adelia sat back on her stool to consider. Such an undoubted murder, only Bertha could believe it an accident, only Bertha could think that royal servants roamed the forest bestowing gifts of enchanted mushrooms on anyone they met. There had been meticulous planning. The old woman, whoever she was, had spun a web to catch the particular fly that was Bertha on the particular day when Rosamund’s dragon, Dakers, had been absent from her mistress’s side.

Which argued that the old woman had been privy to the movements of Rosamund’s household, or instructed by someone who was.

Rowley’s right, Adelia thought, someone wanted Rosamund dead and the queen implicated. If Eleanor had ordered it done, she’d hardly have chosen an old woman who’d mention her name. No, it hadn’t been Eleanor. Whoever had done it had hated the queen even more than Rosamund. Or maybe merely wanted to enrage her husband against her and thereby plunge England into conflict. Which they might.

The shed had become quiet. Bertha’s mumbles that it wasn’t her fault had faded away, leaving only the sound of cows’ chewing and the slither of hay as they pulled more from their mangers.

“For God’s sake,” Adelia asked Bertha desperately, “didn’t you notice anything about the old woman?”

Bertha thought, shaking her head. Then she seemed puzzled. “Smelled purty,” she said.

“She smelled pretty? In what way pretty?”

“Purty.” The girl was crawling forward now, her nose questing like a shrew’s. “Like you.”

“She smelled like me?”

Bertha nodded.

Soap. Good scented soap, Adelia’s one luxury, used only two hours ago in the allover wash to cleanse her from her travels. Bars of it, made with lye, olive oil, and essence of flowers, were sent to her once a year by her foster mother from Rome-Adelia had complained in one of her letters of the soap in England, where the process was based on beef tallow, making its users smell as if they were ready for the oven.

“Did she smell like flowers?” she asked. “Roses? Lavender? Chamomile?” And she knew it was useless. Even if Bertha was conversant with these plants, she would know them only by local names unfamiliar to Adelia.

It had been a gain, though. No ordinary old woman gathering mushrooms in a forest would smell of perfumed soap, even supposing she used soap at all.

Rising to her feet, Adelia said, “If you smell her scent again on anybody else, will you tell me?”

Bertha nodded. Her eyes were fixed on the cross at Adelia’s throat, as if, ignorant of its meaning, it still spoke to her of hope.

And what hope has she, poor thing?

Sighing, Adelia unfastened the chain from her neck and slid it with its cross into Bertha’s dirty little hand, closing her fingers over it. “Keep this until I can buy you one of your own,” she said.

It cost her to do it, not because of the cross’s symbolism-Adelia had been exposed to too many religions to put all her faith in a single one-but because it had been given to her by Margaret, her old nurse, a true Christian, who had died on the journey to England.

But I have known love. I have my child, an occupation, friends.

Bertha, who had none of these things, clasped the cross and, bleating with pleasure, dived back into the straw with it.

As they walked back through the night, Jacques said, “Do you believe that little piggy can sniff out your truffle for you, mistress?”

“It’s a long shot,” Adelia admitted, “but Bertha’s nose is probably the best detector we have. If she should smell the old woman’s scent again, it will be on someone who buys foreign soap and can tell us who their supplier is, who, in turn, could provide us with a list of customers.”

“Clever.” The messenger’s voice was admiring.

After a while, he said, “Do you think the queen was involved?”

“Somebody wants us to think so.”

FIVE

On the rise above a gentle valley, a dog and four riders from Godstow reined in and considered the building and appurtenances crowning the opposite hill.

After some silence, Adelia said, unwisely, “How on earth do tradesmen penetrate it?”

“Gift of flowers and a nice smile used to do it in my day,” the bishop said.

She heard a snort from the two men on either side of her.

“I mean the labyrinth,” she said.

Rowley winked. “So do I.”

More snorts.

Oh, dear, sexual innuendo. Not that she could blame them. From here, the view of Wormhold Tower and what surrounded it looked, well, rude. A very high, thin tower capped by a close-fitting cupola-it even had a tiny walkway around its tip to accentuate the penile resemblance-rose from the ring of a labyrinth that men apparently saw as female pubic hair. It presented an outline that might have been scrawled on the top of its hill by a naughty, adolescent giant. A graffito against the skyline.

The bishop had led them here at a canter, afraid the weather might stop them, but now that the tower was in sight, anxiety had left him relieved and, obviously, with time to enjoy ribaldry.

Actually, it had been an easy journey northward, using the river towpath that ran from Godstow to within a half-mile of the tower. So easy, in fact, that Adelia had been invigorated by it and lost her own fear that the weather would hamper her return to her child.

Such bargemen as they’d encountered had warned them that more snow was on the way, but there was no sign of it. It was a cloudless day, and although the sun hadn’t melted the previous night’s fall, it had been impossible not to rejoice in a countryside like white washing spread out to dry against a laundered blue sky.

Farther south, on the river they’d just left, Mansur, the bishop’s two men-at-arms, and a couple of Godstow’s men were bringing up a barge on which to take the body of Rosamund back to the convent-once Bishop Rowley had retrieved it.

First, though, the labyrinth that surrounded the dead woman’s stronghold had to be got through-a prospect that was stimulating the old Adam in Adelia’s companions.

“I told you,” Rowley said, addressing Adelia but winking at Walt. “Didn’t I say it was the biggest chastity belt in Christendom?”

He was trying to provoke her. Ignore it. “I hadn’t thought it would be quite so large,” she said, and then sighed at herself. Another double entendre to make the men snigger.

Well, she hadn’t. The labyrinth at Saint Giorgio’s in Salerno was considered by the town to be a wonder, supposed to represent in length and complexity the soul’s journey through life. But this thing opposite her now was a colossus. It encircled the tower, forming a ring so thick that it took up a wide section of this side of the hill and disappeared behind it. Its outer wall was nine or ten feet high, while, at this distance, its interior seemed to be filled entirely by white wool.

The prioress of Godstow had warned her about it before she set out. “Blackthorn,” Sister Havis had told her with disgust. “Can you credit it? Walls of granite with blackthorn planted against them.”

What Adelia was looking at was stone and hedge, twisting and turning in frozen undulation.

Not a belt, Adelia thought. A snake, a huge, constricting serpent.

Walt said, “Reckon as that’s a bugger for its hedgers,” nearly causing Rowley to fall off his horse. Jacques was smiling broadly, happy at seeing his bishop unbend.

Sister Havis had said what Adelia could expect. The original labyrinth, she’d said, had been built round his keep by a mad Saxon necromancer and enlarged by his equally mad dispossessor, a Norman, one of the Conqueror’s