The Serpent’s Tale

Sighing, Adelia bent to look into the face. Open, blue eyes were slightly cast downward so that they appeared to be rereading what the hand had just written.

But Fair Rosamund was very dead.

And very fat.

SIX

Dakers,” Adelia said. “Dakers did this.”

Only Dame Dakers could be refusing to let her dead mistress go to her grave.

Rowley was recovering. “We’ll never get her in the coffin like that. For the love of God, do something. I’m not rowing back to Godstow with her sitting up and looking at me.”

“Show some respect, blast you.” Banging the last window closed, Adelia turned on him. “You won’t be rowing, and she won’t be sitting.”

Both were compensating in their own way for the impact of a scene that had unmanned him and unnerved her.

Jacques was staring from the doorway, but Walt, having peered in, had retired downstairs in a hurry. Ward, unperturbed, was scratching himself.

Used to dead bodies as she was, Adelia had never feared one-until now. Consequently, she’d become angry. It was the corpse’s employment.…Rosamund hadn’t died in that position-if it werethe mushrooms that had killed her, the end would have been too violent. No, Dakers had dragged the still-warm carcass onto the Roman chair, arranged it, and then either waited for rigor mortis to set in or, if rigor had already passed, held it in place until the cold coming through the open windows had fixed head, trunk, and limbs as they were now, frozen in the attitude of writing.

Adelia knew this as surely as if she’d seen it happen, but the impression that the dead woman had got up, walked to her table, sat down, and picked up a pen could not be shaken off.

Rowley’s peevishness merely disguised the revulsion that had thrown him off balance, and Adelia, who felt the same, responded to it with irritation. “You didn’t tell me she was fat.”

“Is it relevant?”

No, it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, but it was a sort of aftershock. The image Adelia had gained of Fair Rosamund by repute, from meeting Bertha, from tramping through the dreadful maze, from seeing the even more dreadful mantrap, had been of a beautiful woman with the indifference to human suffering of an Olympian goddess: physically lovely, pampered, aloof, cold as a reptile-but slim. Definitely slim.

Instead, the face she’d bent down to peer into had looked back at her with the innocent chubbiness integral to the obese.

It altered things. She wasn’t sure why, but it did.

“How long has she been dead?” Rowley demanded.

“What?” Adelia’s mind had wandered into inconsequential questioning of the corpse. Why, with your weight, did you live at the top of this tower? How did you get down the stairs to meet Rowley in the garden?

How did you get back up?

“I said, how long has she been dead?”

“Oh.” It was time to collect her wits and do the job she’d been brought here to do. “Impossible to be exact.”

“Was it the mushrooms?”

“How can I tell? Probably yes.”

“Can you flatten her?”

God’s rib, he was a crude man. “She’ll flatten herself,” Adelia said, shortly, “just get some heat into this damned room.” Then she asked, “Why did Dakers want her to be seen writing, do you suppose?”

But the bishop was on the landing, shouting to Walt to bring braziers, kindling, firewood, candles, pushing Jacques into descending and helping the groom, then going down himself on another search for the housekeeper, taking energy with him and leaving the chamber to the quiet of the dead.

Adelia’s thoughts rested wistfully on the man whose calm assistance and reassurance had always been her rock during difficult investigations-for never was one likely to be more difficult than this. Mansur, however, was on the barge bringing Rosamund’s coffin upriver and, even supposing he had arrived at the landing place that served Wormhold Tower a quarter of a mile away, he, Oswald, and the men with them had been told to stay there until the messenger fetched them.

Which could not be tonight. Nobody was going to face the maze of the Wyrm again tonight.

She had only one light; Rowley had taken his taper with him. She put hers on the writing table as near to the corpse’s hand as possible without burning it-a minuscule start to the thawing out of the body that not only would take time but would be messy.

Adelia brought to mind the pigs on which she had studied decomposition at the farm in the hills above Salerno, kept for the purpose by Gordinus, her teacher of the process of mortification. From the various carcasses, her memory went to those frozen in the icehouse he’d had built deep into rock. She calculated weights, times; she envisaged needles of ice crystals solidifying muscle and tissue…and the resultant juices as they melted.

Poor Rosamund. She would be exposed to the outrages of corruption when everything in her chamber spoke of a being who’d loved elegance.

Poor Dakers, who had, undoubtedly, loved her mistress to the point of madness.

Who had also put a crown on her mistress’s head. A real crown, not a fashionable circlet, not a chaplet, not a coronal, but an ancient thing of thick gold with four prongs that rose in the shape of fleur-de-lis from a jeweled brim-the crown of a royal consort. This, Dakers was saying, is a queen.

Yet the same hand had brushed the lovely hair so that it hung untrammeled over the corpse’s shoulders and down its back in the style of a virgin.

Oh, get to it, Adelia told herself. She was not here to be fascinated by the unplumbable depths of human obsession but to find out why someone had found it good that this woman should die and, thereby, who that someone was.

She wished there was some noise from downstairs to ameliorate the deathly quiet of this room. Perhaps it was too high up for sound to reach it.

Adelia turned her attention to the writing table, an eerie business with the shuttered glass on the other side of it acting on it like the silvering of a looking glass, so that she and the corpse were reflected darkly.

A pretty table, highly polished. Near the dead woman’s left hand, as if her fingers could dip into it easily, was a bowl of candied plums.

The bowl was a black-and-red pot figured with athletes like the one her foster father had found in Greece, so ancient and precious that he allowed no one to touch it but himself. Rosamund kept sweetmeats in hers.

A glass inkwell encased in gold filigree. A smart leather holder for quills, and a little ivory-and-steel knife to sharpen them. Two pages of the best vellum, both closely written, lying side by side, one under the right hand. A sand shaker, also glass, in gold filigree matching the inkwell, its sand nearly used up. A tiny burner for melting the wax that lay by it in two red sticks, one shorter than the other.

Adelia looked for a seal and found none, but there was a great gold ring on one of the dead fingers. She picked up the taper and held it close to the ring. Its round face was a matrix that when pressed into softened wax would embed the two letters RR.

Rosamund Regina?

Hmm.

It had mattered to Dakers that Rosamund be recognized as literate-no mean accomplishment in England, even among high-born women. Why else had she been petrified like this? Obviously, she had