The Serpent’s Tale

ignoramus.”

“Write quickly that this may reach the queen on her anniversary as she does set much store by that date and will be the more affected.”

“Hurry, for my messenger must come to Chinon, where the queen is kept, before the king moves her elsewhere.”

And most telling of all: “We win, lady. You shall be queen before summer comes again.”

At no point did the instructor name himself. But, thought Adelia, he was someone who’d been near enough to Eleanor to know that she had ridiculed Rosamund’s writing.

And a fool. If his hope was to engineer a divorce between Henry and Eleanor and set Rosamund up as queen, he was lacking the most fundamental political sense. Henry would never divorce Eleanor. For one thing, even if wifely treason was grounds for divorce-and Adelia didn’t think it was-Henry had caused too much offense to the Church over the death of Becket and had suffered for it; he dare not offend again. For another, he had a regard for the order of things. Even more important to him was the fact that by losing Eleanor, he would lose her great Duchy of Aquitaine, and Henry, though a beast, was a beast that never gave up land.

In any case, the easygoing English might wink at their king’s mistress, but not a mistress imposed on them as queen; it would be an insult.

I know that, and I’m a foreigner.

And yet these letters had been good enough to inspire a stupid, ambitious woman to copy and send them, good enough to inflame a queen into escaping and urging war by her sons against their father.

Rowley could be right; the person who had written these things had done so to create war.

There was a loud sniff from the other side of the room. Eleanor spoke in triumph. “She is going. She has begun to stink.”

That was quicker than expected. Surprised, Adelia looked up to where Rosamund was still stiffly inclined over her work.

She looked round further and saw that, in search of comfort, Ward had settled himself on the trailing end of the queen’s ermine cloak. “I’m afraid that’s merely my dog,” she said.

“Merely? Get him off. What does he do here?”

One of the men-at-arms who’d been nodding in the doorway roused himself and came in to deposit Ward on the landing outside, then, at a nod from his queen, returned to his post.

Eleanor shifted; she’d become restive. “Saint Eulalie grant me patience. How long will this take?” The vigil was becoming tiresome.

Adelia nearly said, “A while yet,” and then didn’t. Until she knew more about the situation, she had better stay in the role of a woman whom the queen accepted as a somewhat soiled part of Rowley’s baggage train but who’d nevertheless been chosen by God to save the royal life and was being kept close to the royal side as a reward.

But you should know more about me, Adelia thought, irritated. I am dying with curiosity; so should you be. You should know more about everything: how Rosamund died, why she wrote the letters, who dictated them…you should have had the room searched and found these exemplars before I did. It’s not enough to be a queen; you should ask questions. Your husband does.

Henry Plantagenet was a ferret and an employer of ferrets. He’d nosed out Adelia’s profession in a second and penned her up in England, like one of the rarer animals in his menagerie, until he found a use for her. He knew exactly how things stood between her and his bishop; he’d known when their baby was born-and its sex, which was more than the child’s father had known. A few days afterward, to prove that he knew, a royal messenger in plain clothes had delivered a gloriously lacy christening gown to Adelia’s fenland door with a note: “Call her what you will, she shall always be Rowley-Powley to me.”

Compared to the king, Eleanor walked within a circle of vision encompassing only her personal welfare and the certainty that God was most closely concerned with it. The questions she’d asked in this chamber had related solely to herself.

Adelia wondered whether she should enlighten her. Rowley and the queen must have corresponded in the past; she would know his writing. Showing her these documents would at least prove that he hadn’t written them for Rosamund to copy. She might even recognize the penmanship and know who had.

Wait, though. There were two crimes here.

If Mansur or her foster father had been watching Adelia at that moment, they would have seen her adopt what they called her “dissecting face,” the mouth tightened into a line, eyes furious with concentration, as they always were when her knife followed the link of muscle to sinew, pursued a vein, probed, and cut effect in order to find cause.

What made her a brilliant anatomist, Dr. Gershom had once told her, was instinct. She’d been offended. “Logic and training, Father.” He’d smiled. “Man provided logic and training, maybe, but the Lord gave you instinct, and you should bless him for it.”

Two crimes.

One, Rosamund had copied inflammatory letters. Two, Rosamund had been murdered.

Discovering whom it was who had urged Rosamund to write her letters was one thing. Discovering her murderer was another. And both solutions were contradictory, as far as Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Bishop of Saint Albans were concerned.

For the queen, the letter writer would be the villain and must be eliminated. Eleanor didn’t give a damn who’d killed Rosamund-would, if she learned who it was, probably reward him.

But for Rowley, the murderer was endangering the peace of the kingdom and must be eliminated. And his claim was the greater, because murder was the more terrible crime.

It would be better, at this stage, to give Rowley open ground for his investigation rather than complicating it by allowing the queen to pursue hers.

Hmm.

Adelia gathered up the documents on her lap, put them back in the footstool box, and replaced its lid. She would do nothing about them until she could consult Rowley.

Eleanor continued to fidget. “Has this benighted tower no place of easement?”

Adelia ushered her toward the garderobe.

“Light.” The queen held out her hand for a candle, and Adelia put one into it-reluctantly. She would see the naughty paintings.

If Adelia could have been any sorrier for the woman, it was then. When you came down to it, Eleanor was consumed by sexual jealousy as raging as that of any fishwife catching her husband in flagrante, and was being stabbed by reminders of it at every turn.

Adelia tensed herself for a storm, but when the queen emerged from under the hanging she looked tired and old, and was silent.

“You should rest, madam,” Adelia said, concerned. “Let us go down…”

There was noise from the stairs, and the two guards in the doorway uncrossed their spears and stood at attention.

A great hill of a man entered, sparkling with energy and frost and dwarfing Schwyz, who followed him in. He was enormous; kneeling to kiss the queen’s hand only put his head on a level with hers.

“If I’d been here, my dear, ’twouldn’t have happened,” he said, still kneeling. He pressed Eleanor’s hand to his neck with both of his, closing his eyes and rocking with the comfort of it.

“I know.” She smiled fondly at him. “My dear, dear abbot. You’d have put your big body in the way of the knife, wouldn’t you?”

“And gone rejoicing to Paradise.” He sighed and stood up, looking down at her. “You going to burn ’em both?”

The queen shook her head. “I have been persuaded that Dampers is mad. We will not execute the insane.”

“Who? Oh, Dakers. She’s mad, sure enough, I told you she was. Let the flame have her, I say. And her bloody mistress with her. Where is the whore?”

He strode across the room to the table and poked the corpse’s shoulder. “Like they said, cold as a witch’s tit.