The Serpent’s Tale

So they did.

What Adelia remembered of that night afterward were the hour-long silences when she and the queen were alone-apart from Montignard, who fell asleep-and during which Eleanor of Aquitaine sat, untiring, her back straight as a plumb line, eyes directed at the body of the woman her husband had loved.

She also remembered, though with disbelief, that at one point a young courtier with a lute came in and strolled about the chamber, singing winsomely in the langue d’oc, and that, after receiving no response from his queen and even less from the corpse, he wandered out again.

And the heat. Adelia remembered the heat of the braziers and a hundred candle flames. At one point, she begged for relief. “May we not open a window for a minute, madam?” It was like being in a pottery kiln.

“No.”

So Adelia, the lucky charm, privileged by her status as God-sent savior to royalty, sat in its presence, crouching on the floor with her cloak under her while the queen, still in her furs, sat and watched a corpse.

Eleanor’s eyes left it only when they brought the brandy, and Adelia, instead of drinking the spirit, tipped it over the cut in her hand and took a needle and silk thread from the traveling pack of instruments in her pocket.

“Who taught you to cleanse with brandy?” Eleanor wanted to know. “I use twice-distilled Bordeaux myself… Oh, here, Ishall do it.”

Tutting at Adelia’s attempt to stitch the wound together with her left hand, she took the needle and thread and did it instead, putting in seven ligatures where Adelia herself would have used only five, thus making a neater, if more painful, job of it. “We who went on Crusade had to learn to treat the wounded, there were so many,” she said briskly.

Most of them caused by the ineptitude of the King of France, its leader, according to Rowley, after his own, much later, time in the Holy Land.

Not that the Church had condemned Louis for it, preferring instead to dwell on the scandal Eleanor, then his queen, had caused by insisting on going with him and taking with her a train of similarly adventurous females.

“Born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, that lady,” Rowley had said of her, not without admiration. “Her and her Amazons. And an affair with Uncle Raymond of Toulouse when she arrived in Antioch. What a woman.”

Something of that daring remained; her very presence here showed as much, but time, thought Adelia, had twisted it into desperation.

“Is that…urgh.” Adelia wished to be brave, but the queen was plying the needle with more skill than gentleness. “Was that where you learned…how to thread a maze? In the… oofff…East?” For there was no sign that Eleanor had spent as much time blundering around Wormhold’s hedges as she and the others had.

“My lady,” insisted the queen.

“My lady.”

“It was, yes. The Saracen is skilled in such devices, as in so much else. I have no doubt your bishop also learned the trick of it from the East. Rowley went there on my orders…a long time ago.” Her voice had softened. “He took the sword of my dead little son to Jerusalem and laid it on Christ’s own altar.”

Adelia was comforted; the bond between Eleanor and Rowley made by that vicarious crusade went deep. It might be stretched to its limit in present circumstances, but it still held. The queen had taken him prisoner; she wouldn’t allow him to be killed.

She’s a mother, Adelia thought. She’ll let me go back to my baby. There would be an opportunity to ask for that when she and the queen were better acquainted. In the meantime, she still had to learn all she could about Rosamund’s murder. Eleanor hadn’t ordered it. Who had?

Taper light had been kinder to the queen than the blazing illumination around them now. Elegance was there and always would be, so was the lovely, pale skin that went with auburn hair, now hidden, but wrinkles were puckering at her mouth and the tight, gauze wimple around her face did not quite hide the beginning of sagging flesh under the chin. Slender, yes, fine bones, yes. Yet there was another sag above the point where a jeweled belt encircled her hips.

No wonder, either. Two daughters by her first husband, Louis of France, and, since their divorce, eight more children from her marriage to Henry Plantagenet, five of them sons.

Ten babies. Adelia thought of what carrying Allie had done to her own waistline. She’s a marvel to look as she does.

There wouldn’t be any more, though; even if king and queen had not been estranged, Eleanor must now be, what, fifty years old?

And Henry probably not yet forty.

“There,” the queen said, and bit through the needle end of the silk now holding Adelia’s palm together. Producing an effusion of lace that served her as a handkerchief, she bound it efficiently round Adelia’s hand and tied it with a last, painful tug.

“I am grateful, my lady,” Adelia said in earnest.

But Eleanor had returned to her watch, her eyes on the corpse.

Why? Adelia wondered. Why this profane vigil? It’s beneath you.

The woman had escaped from a castle in the Loire Valley, had traveled through her husband’s hostile territory gathering followers and soldiers as she went, had crossed the Channel and slipped into southern England. All this to get to an isolated tower in Oxfordshire. And in winter. True, most of the journey had obviously been made before the roads became as impassable as they now were-to arrive at the tower, she must have been camped not far away. Nevertheless, it was a titanic journey that had tired out everybody but Eleanor herself. For what? To gloat over her rival?

But, Adelia thought, the enemy is vanquished, petrified into a winter version of Sodom and Gomorrah’s block of salt. An assassination has been thwarted by me and an Eleanor- preserving God. Rosamund turns out to have been fat. All this is sufficient, surely, to satisfy any lust for revenge.

But not the queen’s, obviously; she must sit here and enjoy the vanquished one’s decomposition. Why?

It wasn’t because she’d envied the younger mistress the ability to still bear children. Rosamund hadn’t had any.

Nor was it as if Rosamund had been the only royal paramour. Henry swived more women than most men had hot dinners. “Literally, a father to his people,” Rowley had said of him once, with pride.

It was what kings did, almost an obligation, a duty-in Henry’s case, a pleasure-to his realm’s fertility.

To make the damn crops grow, Adelia thought sourly.

Yet Eleanor’s own ducal ancestors themselves had encouraged the growth of acres of Aquitanian crops in their time; she’d been brought up not to expect marital fidelity. Indeed, when she’d had it, wedded to the praying, monkish King Louis, she’d been so bored she’d petitioned for divorce.

And hadn’t she obliged Henry by taking one of his bastards into her household and rearing him? Young Geoffrey, born of a London prostitute, was proving devoted and useful to his father; Rowley had a greater regard for him than for any of the king’s four remaining legitimate sons.

Rosamund, only Rosamund, had inspired a hatred that raised the heat of this awful room, as if Eleanor’s body was pumping it across the chamber so that the flesh of the woman opposite would putrefy quicker.

Was it that Rosamund had lasted longer than the others, that the king had shown her more favor, a deeper love?

No, Adelia said to herself. It was the letters. Menopausal as Eleanor was, she’d believed their message: Another woman was being groomed to take her place; in both love and status, she was being overthrown.

If it had been Eleanor who’d poisoned Rosamund, it was tit for tat. In her own way, Rosamund had poisoned Eleanor.

Yet Rowley had been right: This queen hadn’t murdered anybody.

There was no proof of it, of course. Nothing that would absolve her. The killing had been plotted at long range;