The Serpent’s Tale

Because she’d found it. Her fingers had encountered the harsh thread of metal, little and broken-the cross was held by the fastening, but farther along, the links had snapped.

God help us all. This, then, was where it had happened. In this dark stall, Bertha had torn at her own neck in an attempt to dislodge the necklet with which strong hands were strangling her.

Oh, the poor child.

Adelia again saw Bertha crawling toward her, sniffing, telling her what the old woman in the forest, who had given her the mushrooms for Rosamund, had smelled like.

“Purty. Like you.”

The memory was unbearable. The short, sad little life ending in violence…Why? Who?

“Mistress?” Jacques was becoming troubled by her stillness.

Adelia picked herself up. Gripping the necklet, she walked with the messenger down to where Peg was pouring her full pail of foaming milk into a bigger bucket, her backside giving a provocative wiggle at Jacques’s approach.

The milking stool. She knew now that Bertha had been murdered, but there was just one more proof…

As Peg went to collect the stool to take it to the next cow, Adelia was ahead of her. “May I have this for a moment?”

Peg and Jacques stared as she took the stool and placed it directly under the hook in the beam. She unwound the length of cord from her hand and pushed it toward Jacques. “Measure me.”

“Measure you, mistress?”

“Yes.” She was becoming irritable. “From my crown to my feet.”

Shrugging, he held one end of the cord to the top of Adelia’s head and let it drop. He stooped and pinched the place where it touched the ground. “There. You’re not very tall, mistress.”

She tried to smile at him-his own lack of height bothered him; without his raised boots, he wouldn’t be much higher than she was. Looking at the cord where he held it, she saw that it extended a little way from the knot she had made when she’d measured the corpse on the catafalque. She was nearly two inches taller than Bertha had been.

Now to see.

Peg said, “She got excited yesterday, round about evening milkin’, now I come to think on it.”

“Who did? Bertha?”

“Said she’d got summat to tell the lady with the cross and went rushin’ out. That’s what she’d call a nun, I suppose, on account of she didn’t know better.”

No, Adelia thought, it was me. I was the lady with the cross. “Where did she go?”

“Can’t have been far,” Peg said, “for she were soon back and takin’ on like she’d seen the devil stinkin’ of sulphur. Summat about acres.”

“Dakers?” Jacques asked.

“Could’ve been.”

“Must’ve seen Dame Dakers,” Jacques said. “She was mortal afraid of that woman.”

Adelia asked, “She didn’t say what it was she wanted to tell the nun?”

“Kept mutterin’ something about wasn’t her, ’twas him.”

Adelia steadied herself against a stall’s stanchion, grasping it hard. “Could it have been: ‘It wasn’t a her, it was a him’?”

“Could’ve been.”

“Hmmm.” She wanted to think about it, but the cows farther up the line were lowing with discomfort, and Peg was becoming restive at the annexation of her milking stool.

Adelia slipped the belt into its buckle and put it round her neck, pulling it close. Stepping up on the stool, she tried extending the free piece of the belt to the hook, managing only to make the end of the leather touch it, leaving a gap between hook and rivet. She stood on tiptoe; rivet and hook still didn’t meet-and she was taller than Bertha had been.

“It’s too short,” she said. “The belt’s too short.”

That was what had bothered her. The sight of the dangling body had been too shocking to take in at the time, but her mind had registered it-Bertha’s feet could not have reached the stool to kick it away.

She began choking, struggling to get the buckle undone before unseen arms could lift her up and attach the belt to the hook; she couldn’t breathe.

Jacques’s hands fumbled at her neck and she fought them, as Bertha had fought those of her killer. “All right, mistress,” he said. “Steady. Steady now.” When he’d got the belt off, he held her arm and stroked her back as if soothing a frightened cat. “Steady now. Steady.”

Peg was watching them as if at the capering insane. Jacques nodded at her, indicating the stool, and with relief she took it up and went back to her cows.

Adelia stood where she was, listening as Peg’s capable, cold-chapped hands squeezed and relaxed on the cow’s teats, sending milk into the pail with the regularity of a soft drumbeat.

“It wasn’t a her, it was a him.”

Jacques’s eyes questioned her; he, at least, had understood what she’d been about.

“Well,” Adelia said, “at least now Bertha can be buried in consecrated ground.”

“Not suicide?’

“No. She was murdered.”

She saw again how his young face could age.

“Dakers,” he said.

NINE

T he nuns thought the same.

“Let me understand you,” Mother Edyve said. “You are saying that Dame Dakers hanged that poor child?”

They were in the chapter house; the abbess was in conclave with her senior nuns.

They had not welcomed Adelia. After all, they had serious matters to mull over: Their abbey had been as good as invaded; dangerous mercenaries occupied it; there were bodies hanging from their bridge; if the snow continued, they would soon run out of supplies. They did not want to listen to the outlandish, unsettling report of a murder- murder?-in their midst.

However, Adelia had done one thing right; she had brought Mansur along. Gyltha had persuaded her. “They won’t pay you no mind,” she’d said, “but they might attend to that old Arab.” And after a few hours’ sleep, Adelia had decided she was right. Mansur had been recommended to the nuns by their bishop, he looked impressive, he stood high in the estimation of their infirmaress; above all, he was a man, and as such, even though a foreigner, he carried more weight than she did.

It had been difficult to get a hearing until the chapter meeting was over, but Adelia had refused to wait. “This is the king’s business,” she’d said. For so it was; murder, wherever it occurred, came under royal jurisdiction. The lord Mansur, she told them, was skilled in uncovering crimes, had originally been called to England by Henry II’s warrant to look into the deaths of some Cambridgeshire children-well, so he had, in a way-and the killer had been found.

Apologizing for Mansur’s insufficiency in their language, she had pretended to interpret for him. She’d begged them to examine for themselves the marks on Bertha’s neck, had shown them the evidence by which she proved murder…and heard her voice scrabbling at them as uselessly as Bertha’s fingers had scrabbled at the necklet strangling her.

She answered Mother Edyve, “The lord Mansur is not accusing Dame Dakers. He is saying that somebody hanged Bertha. She did not hang herself.”