The Serpent’s Tale

Ah. At last, Adelia thought, a logical mind. Hostile, cold as winter to me, but brave. Here, beside her, was a woman prepared to follow terrible events to their terrible conclusion.

She said, “Bertha had some knowledge about the person who gave her the mushrooms in the forest. She didn’t know she had it. It came to her yesterday, and I think, I think, that she left the cowshed to come and tell me. Something, or perhaps it was someone, stopped her, and she went back again. To be strangled and then hanged.”

“Not a random killing?”

“I don’t believe so. Nor was there any sexual interference, as far as I can tell. It wasn’t robbery, either; the chain was not stolen.”

Unconsciously, they had begun pacing up and down together outside the chapel. Adelia said, “What she told Peg was that it wasn’t a her, it was a him.”

“Meaning the person in the forest?”

“I think so. I think, I think, Bertha remembered something, something about the old woman who gave her the mushrooms for Rosamund. I think it came to her that it wasn’t an old woman at all-her description always sounded…I don’t know, odd.”

“Old women peddling poisoned mushrooms aren’t odd?”

Adelia smiled. “Overdone, then. Playacting. I think that’s what Bertha wanted to tell me. Not a her but a him.”

“A man? Dressed as a woman?”

“I think so.”

The prioress crossed herself. “The inference being that Bertha could have told us who it was that killed Rosamund…”

“Yes.”

“…but was strangled before she could tell us…by that same person.”

“I think so.”

“I was afraid of it. The Devil stalks secretly amongst us.”

“In human form, yes.”

“‘I shall not fear,’” quoted Sister Havis. “‘I shall not fear for the arrow that flieth by day, for the matter that walketh in darkness, nor for the Devil that is in the noonday.’” She looked at Adelia. “Yet I do.”

“So do I.” Oddly, though, not as much as she had; there was a tiny comfort in having passed on what she knew to authority, and here, though personally hostile, was almost the only authority the convent could offer.

After a while, Sister Havis said, “We have had to take the body from the bridge out of the icehouse. A man came asking for him, a cousin, he said-a Master Warin, a lawyer from Oxford. We laid out the body in the church for its vigil and so that he might identify it. Apparently, it is that of a young man called Talbot of Kidlington. Is he another of this devil’s victims?”

“I don’t know.” She realized she had been saying “I” all this time. “I shall consult with the Lord Mansur. He will investigate.”

The slightest flicker of amusement crossed the prioress’s face; she knew who the investigator was. “Pray do,” she said.

From the cloister ahead of them came the sound of laughter and singing. It had, Adelia realized, been going on for some time. Music, happiness, still existed, then.

Automatically, the prioress began walking toward it. Adelia went with her.

A couple of the younger nuns were screaming joyously in the garth as they dodged snowballs being pelted at them by a scarlet-clad youth. Another young man was strumming a viol and singing, his head upraised to an upper window of the abbess’s house, at which Eleanor stood laughing at the antics.

This, in the sanctum. Where no layman should set foot. Probably never had until now.

From Eleanor’s window came a trail of perfume, elusive as a mirage, shimmering with sensuality, a siren scent beckoning toward palm-fringed islands, a smell so lovely that Adelia’s nose, even while it analyzed-bergamot, sandalwood, roses-sought longingly after its luxury before the icy air took it away from her.

Oh, Lord, I am so tired of death and cold.

Sister Havis stood beside her, rigid with disapproval, saying nothing. But in a minute the players saw her. The scene froze instantly; the troubadour’s song stopped in his throat, snow dropped harmlessly from the hand of his companion, and the young nuns assumed attitudes of outraged piety and continued their walk as if they had never broken stride. The snowballer swept his hat from his head and held it to his chest in parodied remorse.

Eleanor waved from her window. “Sorry,” she called, and closed the shutters.

So I am not the only taint, Adelia thought, amused. The queen and her people were bringing the rich colors of worldliness into the convent’s black-and-white domain; the presence of Eleanor, which had undermined an entire Crusade, threatened Godstow’s foundations as even Wolvercote and his mercenaries did not.

Then the amusement went. Did she bring a killer with her?

Adelia was too tired to do much for the rest of the morning except look after Allie while Gyltha went off to meet friends in the kitchen. It was where she picked up a good deal of information and gossip.

On her return, she said, “They’re busy cooking for young Emma’s wedding now that Old Wolfie’s turned up. Poor soul, I wouldn’t fancy marryin’ that viper. They’re wondering if she’s having second thoughts-she’s keeping to the cloister and ain’t spoke a word to him, so they say.”

“It’s bad luck to see your bridegroom before the wedding,” Adelia said vaguely.

“I wouldn’t want to see him after,” Gyltha said. “Oh, and later on the sisters is going to see about them hangin’ off the bridge. Abbess says it’s time they was buried.” She took off her cloak. “Should be interestin’. Old Wolfie, he’ll be the sort as likes corpses decoratin’ the place.” There was gleam in her eye. “Maybe as there’ll be a battle atwixt ’em. Oh, Lord, where you going now?”

“The infirmary.” Adelia had remembered her patient.

Sister Jennet greeted her warmly. “Perhaps you can convey my gratitude to the Lord Mansur. Such a neat, clean stump, and the patient is progressing well.” She looked wistful. “How I should have liked to witness the operation.”

It was the instinct of a doctor, and Adelia thought of the women lost to her own profession, as this one was, and thanked her god for the privilege that had been Salerno.

She was escorted down the ward. All the patients were men-“women mainly treat themselves”-most of them suffering from congestion of the lungs caused, the infirmaress said, by living on low-lying ground subject to unhealthy vapors from the river.

Three were elderly, from Wolvercote. “These are malnourished,” the infirmaress said of them, not bothering to lower her voice. “Lord Wolvercote neglects his villagers shamefully; they haven’t so much as a church to pray in, not since it fell down. It is God’s grace to them that we are nearby.”

She passed on to another bed where a nun was applying warm water to a patient’s ear. “Frostnip,” she said.

With a pang of guilt, Adelia recognized Oswald, Rowley’s man-at-arms. She’d forgotten him, yet he had been one of those, along with Mansur, poling the barge that the convent had sent to Wormhold.

Walt was sitting at his bedside. He knuckled his forehead as Adelia came up.

“I’m sorry,” she told Oswald. “Is it bad?”

It looked bad. Dark blisters had formed on the outer curve of the ear so that the man appeared to have a fungus attached to his head. He glowered at her.

“Shoulda kept his hood pulled down,” Walt said, cheerfully. “We did, didn’t we, mistress?” The mutual suffering on the boat had become a bond.

Adelia smiled at him. “We were fortunate.”

“We’re keeping an eye on the ear,” Sister Jennet said, equally cheerful. “As I tell him, it will either stay on or fall off. Come along.”

There were still screens round young Poyns’s bed-not so much, Sister Jennet explained, to provide privacy for