The Serpent’s Tale

“They cause me no pain,” Mansur said stolidly.

“They will in a minute,” Adelia promised.

Gyltha ran to Mansur’s lodging to get him a dry gown and cloak, and brought back with her a bucket of hot water from the kitchen and would have plunged her lover’s hands into it, but Adelia stopped her. “Wait til it cools a little.”

She also prevented Gyltha from hooking the brazier nearer to him. The condition of frostbite had interested her foster father after he’d seen the effects of it during their holidays in the Alps-he had actually braved a winter there to study it-and his conclusion had been that the warming must be gradual.

Young Allie, always deprived of burning herself on the brazier-it was kept within a guard-turned her attention to trying to pull the bucket over her head. Adelia would have enjoyed watching the resulting tussle between Gyltha and that remarkable child if her own toes hadn’t ached agonizingly with the return of blood to frozen muscle and bone.

She estimated the worth of dosing herself and Mansur with willow-bark decoction for the pain and then rejected it; each of them was a stoic, and the fact that her toes and his fingers were turning red without blistering indicated that the affliction was mild-better to keep the drug for those in whom it might be worse.

She crawled onto the bed to suffer in comfort. Ward leaped on after her, and she had neither the energy nor will to turn him off. The dog had shared his body heat with her on the boat-what were a few fleas if she shared hers with him?

“What did you do with Dakers?” she asked.

“Oh, her.” Gyltha had not taken to the walking skeleton that Adelia had dragged, unaware that she was dragging it, through the convent gates, but had seen, because Adelia was dragging it, that there was a necessity to keep it alive. “I give her to Sister Havis, and she give her to Sister Jennet in the infirmary. She’s all right, ugly thing.”

“Well done.” Adelia closed her eyes.

“Don’t you want to know who’s turned up here since you been away?”

“No.”

When she woke up, it was afternoon. Mansur had gone back to the men’s guesthouse to rest. Gyltha was sitting beside the bed, knitting-a skill she’d picked up from one of her Scandinavian customers during her eel-selling days.

Adelia’s eyes rested on the chubby little figure of Allie as it hitched itself around the floor on its bottom, chasing the dog and grimacing to show the one tiny tooth that had manifested itself in her lower gum since her mother had last seen her. “I swear I’ll never leave you again,” she told her.

Gyltha snorted. “I keep telling you, ’twas only thirty hours.”

But Adelia knew the separation had been longer than that. “It was nearly permanent,” she’d said, and added painfully, “For Rowley, it has been.”

Gyltha wouldn’t countenance it. “He’ll be back, large as life and twice as natural. Take more than a bit of old snow to finish off that lad.” To Gyltha, the Right Reverend Lord Bishop of Saint Albans would always be “that lad.”

“He can stay away for me,” Adelia said. She clung on to her grievance against him like a raft to keep her from being subsumed in grief. “He didn’t care, Gyltha, not for his life, not Allie’s, not mine.”

“Except to make the sun come up.”

“A’course he didn’t, he’s out to stop a war as’ll take more lives than yours. God’s work that is, and the Lord’ll watch over un according.”

Adelia clung to that, too, but she had been deeply frightened. “I don’t care, if it’s God’s work, let Him do it. We are leaving. As soon as the snow clears, we’re all slipping away back to the fens.”

“Oh, ar?” Gyltha said.

“It’s not ‘oh, ar.’ I mean it.” In the fens, her life had been acceptable, regulated, useful. She’d been ripped away from it, subjected to, and then abandoned in, physical and mental turmoil by the man at whose request she had become embroiled in it in the first place. Almost worse than anything, he had revived in her an emotion that she’d thought to be dead, that was better dead.

“Except to make the sun come up.”

Damn him, don’t think of it.

Gaining anger, she said, “It’s all high politics, anyway. That’s what Rosamund’s killing was, as far as I can see-an assassination to do with queens and kings and political advantage. It’s outside my scope. Was it the mushrooms? Yes, it probably was. Do I know who sent them? No, I don’t, and there’s an end to it. I’m a doctor, I won’t be drawn into their wars. God’s rib, Gyltha, Eleanor abducted me, abducted me-I nearly ended up joining her damned army.”

“Shouldn’t have saved her life, then, should you?”

“What was I to do? Dakers was coming at her with a knife.”

“You sure you don’t want to know who else’s turned up?”

“No. I only want to know whether anybody’s likely to stop us going.”

But it appeared that in the physical collapse affecting all the travelers, even Eleanor, on their arrival at the convent, nobody had spared a thought for the woman who had saved the queen’s life-or, for that matter, the woman who had nearly taken it. The priority had been a place to get warm and to sleep.

Perhaps, Adelia thought, the queen had forgotten Dakers and herself altogether and, when the roads were open again, would proceed to Oxford without attending to either. By which time Adelia would be beyond reach, taking Gyltha, Mansur, and Allie with her and leaving Dame Dakers to her own hideous devices-she no longer cared what they were.

Gyltha went to fetch their supper from the kitchen.

Adelia leaned down from the bed, picked up her daughter, pressing her nose against the warm satin of the child’s cheek, and propped her up against her own knees so that they faced each other.

“We’re going home, aren’t we, mistress? Yes, we are. We won’t get involved in their old wars, will we? No, we won’t. We’ll go far off, we’ll go back to Salerno, we don’t care what that nasty old King Henry says, do we? We’ll find the money from somewhere. It’s no good making faces…” For Allie was extending her lower lip and showing her new tooth in an expression reminiscent of the camel in Salerno’s menagerie. “You’ll like Salerno, it’s warm. We’ll take Mansur and Gyltha and Ulf, yes, we will. You miss Ulf, don’t you? So do I.”

On an investigation like this-had she been going to proceed with it-Gyltha’s grandson would have been her eyes and ears, able to go about unremarked as only an eleven-year-old urchin could, his plain, very plain, features giving the lie to his extreme intelligence.

Nevertheless, Adelia thanked her God that Ulf, at least, was out of harm’s way. She found herself wondering, though, what the boy would have said about the situation…

Allie started wriggling, wanting to continue with her persecution of Ward, so Adelia set her down absently, listening to a harsh little voice in her head that asked questions like an insistent crow.

Two murders, ain’t there? Rosamund’s and the fella on the bridge? You think they’re connected?

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” she answered out loud.

It was goin’ to depend on who turned up, weren’t it? Somebody was, to see why there hadn’t been no fuss about the dead un on the bridge? Whoever done it wanted him dead, din’t they? An’ wanted a hullabaloo about it, din’t they?

“Such was my assumption. But there hasn’t been time, the snow would have delayed them.”

Somebody’s come.

“I don’t care. I’m going home, I’m frightened.”

Leavin’ the poor bugger in the icehouse, is that it? Very godly, I’m sure.

“Oh, shut up.”

Adelia liked order; in a sense, it was what her profession was about-and you could say this for the dead, they didn’t make unexpected moves or threaten you with a knife. To be out of control and at the whim of others, especially the malignantly inclined, as she had been at Wormhold and on the river, had discomposed her very being.