The Serpent’s Tale

Each room was deserted. Each was marginally less uncomfortable than the one below. A sewing room-looted, for the most part, but the bench tables set under each arrow slit to catch the light carried torn strips of material and an errant pincushion. A plaster dummy had been smashed to the floor, and shards of it were seemingly kicked onto the landing.

“They hated her,” said Adelia, peering in through the arched doorway.

“Who?”

“The servants.”

“Hated who?” The bishop was beginning to puff.

“Rosamund,” Adelia told him. “Or Dame Dakers.”

“With these stairs? I don’t blame ’em.”

She grinned at his laboring back. “You’ve been eating too many episcopal dinners.”

“As you say, mistress.” He was unoffended. It was a rebuff; in the old days, he’d have been indignant.

I must remember, she thought. We are no longer intimate; we keep our distance.

The fourth room-or was it the fifth?-had not been looted, though it was starker than any. A truckle bed, its gray, knitted bedspread rigidly tucked in. A deal table on which stood ewer and basin. A stool. A plain chest with a few bits of women’s clothing, equally plain and neatly folded.

“Dakers’s room,” Adelia said. She was beginning to get the feel of the housekeeper, and was daunted by it.

“Nobody’s here. Leave it.”

But Adelia was interested. Here, the looters had desisted. Here, she was sure, Dragon Dakers had stood on the stairs, as frightening as Bertha described her, and stopped them from going farther.

Rosamund’s escutcheon was carved into the eastern section of the west wall above Dakers’s bed; it had been painted and gilded so that it dominated the gray room. Raising her candle to look at it, Adelia heard an intake of breath from Rowley in the doorway that wasn’t due to exertion.

“God’s teeth,” he said, “that’s madness.”

A carved outer shield showed three leopards and the fleur-de-lis, which every man and woman in England now recognized as the arms of their Angevin Plantagenet king. Inside it was a smaller shield, checkered, with one quarter containing a serpent, the other a rose.

Even Adelia’s scanty knowledge of heraldry was enough to know that she was looking at the escutcheon of a man and his wife.

The bishop, staring, joined her. “Henry. In the name of God, Henry, what were you doing to allow this? It’s madness.”

A motto had been carved into the wall beneath the escutcheon. Like most armorial mottos, it was a pun. Rosa Mundi.

Rose of all the world.

“Oh, dear,” Adelia said.

“Jesus have mercy,” Rowley breathed. “If the queen saw this…”

Together, motto and escutcheon made the taunt of all taunts: He prefers me to you. I am his wife in all but name, the true queen of his heart.

The bishop’s mind was leaping ahead. “Damnation. Whether Eleanor’s seen it or not is irrelevant. It’s enough for others to assume that she knows of it and had Rosamund killed because of it. It’s a reason to kill. It’s flaunting usurpation.”

“It’s a bit of stone with patterns on it put up by a silly woman,” Adelia protested. “Does it matter so much?”

Apparently, it did-and would. Pride mattered to a queen. Her enemies knew it; so did the enemies of the king.

“I’ll kill the bitch if she isn’t dead already,” said the man of God. “I’ll burn the place down, and her in it. This is an invitation to war.”

She was puzzled. “You’ve been here before, I’d expect you to have seen it already.”

He shook his head. “We met in the garden; she was taking the air. We gave thanks to God for her recovery, and then Dakers led me back through the Wyrm. Where is Dakers?”

He pushed past Jacques and Walt, who stood blinking in the doorway, and attacked the stairs, shouting for the housekeeper. Doors slammed open as he looked into the next room, dismissed it, and raced upward to the next.

They hurried after him, the tower resounding with the crash of boots and the click of a dog’s paws on stone.

Now they were climbing past Rosamund’s apartments. Dakers, if it was Dakers, had been able to preserve them in all their glory. Adelia, trying to keep up, was vouchsafed glimpses of spring and autumn come together. Persian carpets, Venetian goblets, damask divans, gold-rich icons and triptychs, arras, statuary: the spoils of an empire laid at the feet of an emperor’s mistress.

Here were glazed windows, not the arrow slits of the rooms below. They were shuttered, but the taper’s light as Adelia passed reflected an image of itself in lattices of beautiful and expensive glass.

And through the open doors came perfume, subtle but strong enough to delight a nose deadened by cold and the foul pelt of a dog.

Adelia sniffed. Roses. He even captured roses for her.

Above her, another door was flung against its jamb. A sharp exclamation from the bishop.

“What is it, what is it?” She reached him on the last landing; there were no more stairs. Rowley was standing facing the open door, but the lit candle in his hand was down by his side, dripping wax onto the floor.

“What is it?”

“You were wrong,” Rowley said.

The cold up here was extraordinary.

“Was I?”

“She’s alive. Rosamund. Alive after all.”

The relief would have been immeasurable if it hadn’t been that he was so strange and there was no light in the room he was facing.

Also, he was making no effort to enter.

“She’s sitting there,” he said, and made the sign of the cross.

Adelia went in, the dog following her.

No perfume here, the cold obliterated scent. Each window-at least eight of them encircled the room-was open, its glazed lattice and accompanying shutter pushed outward to allow in air icy enough to kill. Adelia felt her face shrivel from it.

Ward went ahead. She could hear him sniffing round the room, giving no sign that he encountered anybody. She went in a little farther.

The glow of the taper fell on a bed against the northerly wall. Exquisite white lace swept from a gilded rondel in the ceiling to part over pillows and fall at either side of a gold-tasseled coverlet. It was a high and magnificent bed, with a tiny ivory set of steps placed so that its owner might be assisted to reach it.

Nobody was in it.

Its owner was sitting at a writing table opposite, facing a window, a pen in her hand.

Adelia, her taper now vibrating a little, saw the glancing facets of a jeweled crown and ash-blond hair curling from it down the writer’s back.

Go nearer. You have to. It can’t harm you. It can’t.

She willed herself forward. As she passed the bed, she stepped on a fold of its lace lying on the floor, and the ice in it crunched under her boot.

“Lady Rosamund?” It seemed polite to say it, even knowing what she knew.

She took off her glove to touch the figure’s unexpectedly large shoulder and felt the chill of stone in what had once been flesh. She saw a white, white hand, its wrist braceleted with skin, like a baby’s. Thumb and forefinger were supporting a goose quill as if it had only seconds ago drawn the signature on the document on which they rested.