The Serpent’s Tale

“The doctor doesn’t know,” she said-to hell with the bedside manner; it wasn’t as if this man had been nice to her on the boat. “Your friend has youth on his side, but his injury was poisoned for too long and”-she leaned in to the attack-“should have been treated before this. Now go away and leave me alone.”

She watched him slouch off after the laden Mansur, then sat herself by the fire, making lists in her head. There was plenty of willow bark, thanks be; the patient would need it for the pain. If he lived.

The stink of decomposition coming from the kitchen pail was a worry to her; after all, this was the kitchen that served their food. A rat appeared from behind a cupboard, its whiskers twitching in the direction of the pail. Adelia reached for the woodpile and threw a log at it.

What to do with severed limbs? In Salerno, she’d had other people to dispose of them. She’d always suspected they mixed them with the pigs’ swill; it was one of the reasons she had been wary of eating pork.

Wrapping herself in her cloak and carrying the bucket, she went out into the alley to find some place of disposal. It was shockingly cold after the kitchen’s heat, and very dark.

Farther down the alley someone began screaming. Went on screaming.

“I can’t,” Adelia said out loud. “I just can’t.” But she began blundering toward the sound, hoping somebody else would get there first and deal with whatever it was.

A lantern came bobbing out of the darkness with the sound of running. “Who’s that?” It was the messenger, Jacques. “Oh, it’s you, mistress.”

“Yes. What is that?”

“I don’t know.”

They trotted toward it, being joined as they went by other lanterns that gave glimpses of alarmed faces and slippered feet.

Past the laundry, past the smithy, past the stables-all of it deja vu, and horrible because Adelia now knew where the screams were coming from.

The cowshed doors were open, with people clustering around outside them, some trying to comfort a hysterical milkmaid, though most were transfixed and gaping, holding their lanterns high so that light shone on the dangling figure of Bertha.

A strap round her neck hung her from a hook in a beam. Her bare toes pointed downward toward a milking stool where it lay on its side among the straw.

The nuns lamented over the dead girl. What, they asked, could have possessed her to commit suicide, that so very grievous sin? Had she not known that God was the owner of her life and, consequently, that she had committed an unlawful act against God’s own dominion, forbidden by Scripture and Church?

No, Adelia thought angrily, Bertha hadn’t known that; nobody would have taught her.

Guilt, the sisters said. Hers was the hand that had given poisoned mushrooms to Rosamund; remorse had overcome her.

But they were good and charitable women, and though Bertha would have to be interred in unconsecrated ground outside their convent walls, they took the body to their own chapel to keep a vigil over it in the meantime. They chanted prayers for the dead as they went. The crowd from the cowshed followed them.

Bertha had never had so much attention. Death in such a small community, after all, was always an event; felo-de-se was unheard of and worthy of much attention.

As she followed the procession through the dark alleys, Adelia stayed angry, thinking how wrong it was that a creature who had been denied so much in her short life must now be denied even a Christian burial.

Jacques, walking beside her, shook his head. “Terrible thing this is, mistress. To hang herself, poor soul. Felt herself responsible for Lady Rosamund’s death, I reckon.”

“She didn’t, though, Jacques. You were there. ‘Not my fault, not my fault.’ She said it over and over.” It was one thing Bertha had been clear about.

“Well, then, she was mortal afraid of Dame Dakers. Couldn’t face her, I reckon.”

Yes, she had been afraid of Dakers. That would be the verdict. Either Bertha had suffered intolerable remorse for the death of her mistress or she had been so terrified of what Dakers would do to her that she had preferred to take her own life.

“It’s wrong,” Adelia said.

“A sin,” Jacques agreed. “God have mercy on her soul all the same.”

But it was wrong, everything was wrong. The scene of Bertha hanging from the hook had been wrong.

They were approaching the chapel. Such laypeople as had been accompanying the body stopped. This was the nuns’ territory; they must stay outside. Even if she could have gone on, Adelia couldn’t bear it anymore, not Jacques and his gloomy chatter, not the accompanying, expostulating men and women, not the nuns’ chanting. “Where’s the guesthouse from here?”

Jacques showed her the way back. “A good night’s sleep, mistress. That’s what you need.”

“Yes.” But it wasn’t fatigue, though she was very tired, it was the wrongness of everything. It hammered at her mind like something wanting to come in.

The messenger lighted her up the steps and then went off, muttering and shaking his head.

Gyltha had heard the screaming even from their room and had called out the window to find its cause. “Bad business,” she said. “They’re saying sorrow made her do it, poor mite.”

“Or perhaps she was frightened that Dame Dakers would turn her into a mouse and give her to the cat, yes, I know.”

Gyltha looked up from her knitting, alerted. “Oh, ar? What’s this?”

“It’s wrong.” Adelia fondled Ward’s ears, then pushed the dog away.

Gyltha’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing more on the subject. “How’s the Fleming?”

“I don’t think he’ll survive.” Adelia wandered to their communal bed and soothed back her sleeping daughter’s hair.

“Serve un right.” Gyltha didn’t hold with mercenaries, whose extensive use during the Stephen and Matilda war had made them universally loathed. Whether they came from Flanders or not-and most of them did-the name “Fleming” had become a euphemism for rape, pillage, and cruelty. “One thing about the king,” she said, “he got rid of all they bastards, and now Eleanor’s bringing ’em back.”

“Hmmm.”

Gyltha raised her eyebrows. She’d prepared a hot posset-the room smelled deliciously of hot milk and rum. She handed a beaker to Adelia. “You know what time it is?” She pointed to the hour marks on the candle by the bed. “Time you was in bed. Nearly morning. They’ll be singing Matins soon.”

“It’s all wrong, Gyltha.”

Gyltha sighed; she knew the signs. “It’ll keep til morning.”

“No, it won’t.” Adelia roused herself and refastened her cloak. “A measure, I need a measure. Have we any string?”

There was cord that they used to bind their traveling packs. “And I want that back,” Gyltha said. “Good cord that is. Where you going?”

“I left the medicine bag in the kitchen. I’d better go and get it.”

“You stay there,” Gyltha told her sharply. “You ain’t going nowhere without that old Arab goes, too.”

But Adelia had gone, taking the cord and a lantern with her. Not to the kitchen. She made her way to the nuns’ chapel. It was dawn.

They had laid Bertha’s body on a catafalque in the little nave. The sheet they’d covered it with dragged all the vague light from the high windows to its own oblong whiteness, condemning the rest of the space to a misty dust.

Adelia strode up the nave, the shushing of her feet in the rushes disturbing the quiet so that the nun on her knees at the foot of the catafalque turned to see who it was.

Adelia paid her no attention. She put the lantern on the floor while she turned back the sheet.

Bertha’s face had a bluish tint; the tip of her tongue was just visible where it stuck out of the side of her mouth. This, with her tiny nose, gave her a look of impudence, like some fairy child.