The Serpent’s Tale

SEVEN

By going against the advice of its commander and dragging her small force with her to Wormhold Tower, Eleanor had delayed its objective-which was to join up with the greater rebel army awaiting her at Oxford.

Now, with the weather worsening, Schwyz was frantic to get the queen to the meeting place-armies tended to disperse when kept idle too long, especially in the cold-and there was only one sure route that would take her there quickly: the river. The Thames ran more or less directly north to south through the seven or so miles of countryside that lay between Wormhold and Oxford.

Since the queen and her servants had ridden from their last encampment, accompanied by Schwyz and his men on foot, boats must be found. And had been. A few. Of a sort. Enough to transport the most important members of the royal party and a contingent of Schwyz’s men but not all of either. The lesser servants and most of the soldiers were going to have to journey to Oxford via the towpath-a considerably slower and more difficult journey than by boat. Also, to do so, they were going to have to use the horses and mules that the royal party had brought with them.

All this Adelia gathered as she emerged into the tower’s bottom room, where shouted commands and explanations were compounding chaos.

A soldier was pouring oil onto a great pile of broken furniture while servants, rushing around, screamed at him to wait before applying the flame as they removed chests, packing cases, and boxes that had been carried into the guardroom only hours before. Eleanor traveled heavy.

Schwyz was yelling at them to leave everything; neither those who were to be accommodated in the few boats nor those who would make the trek overland to Oxford could be allowed to carry baggage with them.

Either they didn’t hear him or he was ignored. He was being maddened further by Eleanor’s insistence that she could not proceed without this servant or that and, even when agreement was reached, by the favored ones’ refusal to stand still and be counted. Part of the trouble seemed to be that the Aquitanians doubted the honesty of their military allies; Eleanor’s personal maid shrieked that the royal wardrobe could not be entrusted to “sales mercenaries,” and a man declaring himself to be the sergeant cook was refusing to leave a single pan behind for the soldiers to steal. So outside the tower, soldiers struggled with frozen harnesses to ready the horses and mules, and the queen’s Aquitanians argued and ran back and forth to fetch more baggage, none of which could be accommodated.

There and then Adelia decided that whatever else happened, she herself would make for the towpath if she could-and quickly. Among this amount of disorganization, nobody would see her go and, with luck and the Lord’s good grace, she could walk to the nunnery.

First, though, she had to find Rowley, Jacques, and Walt.

She stood on the stairs looking for them in the confusion before her; they weren’t there, they must have been taken outside. What she did see, though, was a black shape that kept to the shadow of the walls as it made its way toward the stairs, jumping awkwardly like a frog because its feet were hobbled. The rope that had been put round its neck flapped as it came.

Adelia drew back into the dark of the staircase, and as the creature hopped up the first rise, caught it by its arm. “No,” she said.

The housekeeper’s hands and feet had been tied tightly enough to restrain a normal woman, but whoever had done it hadn’t reckoned with the abnormal: Dakers had hopped from wherever her guards had left her in order to try and join her mistress at the top of the tower.

And still would if she could. As Adelia grabbed her, Dakers threw her thin body to shake her off. Unseen by anyone else, the two women struggled.

“You’ll burn,” hissed Adelia. “For God’s sake, do you want to burn with her?”

“Yes-s-s.”

“I won’t let you.”

The housekeeper was the weaker of the two. Giving up, she turned to face Adelia. She had been roughly treated; her nose was bleeding, and one of her eyes was closed and puffy. “Let me go, let me go. I’ll be with her. I got to be with her.”

How insane. How sad. A soldier was readying the tower’s destruction; servants were oblivious to all but their own concerns. Nobody cared if the queen’s would-be assassin died in the flames, might even prefer it if she did.

They can’t do that. She’s mad. One of the reasons Adelia loved England was that if Dakers were brought to trial for her attempt on the queen’s life, no court in the country, seeing what she was, would sentence her to death. Eleanor herself had held to it. Restrain the woman with imprisonment, yes, but the reasonable, ancient dictum of “furiosus furore solum punitur” (the madness of the insane is punishment enough) meant that anyone who’d once possessed reason but by disease, grief, or other accident had lost the use of his or her understanding must be excused the guilt of his or her crime.

It was a ruling that agreed with everything Adelia believed in, and she wasn’t going to see it bypassed, even if Dakers herself was a willing accessory and preferred to die, burning, alongside Rosamund’s body. Life was sacred; nobody knew that better than a doctor who dealt with its absence.

The woman was pulling away from her again. Adelia tightened her grip, feeling a physical revulsion; she, who was never nauseated by corpses, was repelled by this living body she had to clutch so closely to her, by its thinness-it was like hugging a bundle of sticks-by its passion for death.

“Don’t you want to avenge her?” She said it because it was all she could think of to keep the woman still, but, after a minute, a measure of sanity came into the eyes glaring into hers.

The mouth stopped hissing. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t the queen.”

Another hiss. Dakers didn’t believe her. “She paid so’s it could be done.”

“No.” Adelia added, “It wasn’t Bertha, either.”

“I know that.” Contemptuously.

There was a sudden, curious intimacy. Adelia felt herself sucked into whatever understanding the woman possessed, saw her own worth as an ally calculated, dismissed-and then retrieved. She was, after all, the only ally.

“I find things out. It’s what I do,” Adelia said, slackening her grip a little. Suppressing distaste, she added, “Come along with me and we’ll find things out together.”

Once more she was weighed, found wanting, weighed again, and adjudged as possibly useful.

Dakers nodded.

Adelia fumbled in her pocket for her knife and cut the rope round the housekeeper’s ankles and took the noose from round the neck over her head. She paused, unsure whether to free her hands as well. “You promise?”

The only good eye squinted at her. “You’ll find out?”

“I’ll try. It’s why the Bishop of Saint Albans brought me here.” Not very reassuring, she thought, considering that the Bishop of Saint Albans was leaving the place as a prisoner and Armageddon was about to break out.

Dakers held out her skinny wrists.

Schwyz had left the guardroom in order to gain control of the situation in the bailey outside. Some of the servants had gone with him; the few that remained were still gathering their goods and didn’t notice the two women sidling out.

There was equal confusion in the bailey. Adelia covered Dakers’s head with the hood of her cloak and then put up her own so that they would be just two more anonymous figures in the scurry.

A rising wind added to the noise as it whirled little showers of snowflakes that were slow to melt. Moonlight came and went like a guttering candle.

Disregarded, still clutching Dakers, Adelia moved through the chaos with Ward at her heels, looking for Rowley. She glimpsed him on the far side of the bailey, and it was a relief to see that Jacques and Walt were with him, all three roped together. Nearby, the Abbot of Eynsham was arguing over them with Schwyz, his voice dominating the noise made by the wind and bustle. “…I don’t care, you tyrant, I need to know what they know. They come with us.” Schwyz’s retort was whirled away, but Eynsham had won. The three prisoners were prodded toward the crowd