The Serpent’s Tale

In the large open area beyond the grain barn, one of Wolvercote’s liveried men was walking up and down outside the pepper pot lockup, though what he might be guarding Adelia couldn’t imagine.

Farther along, the convent smith was pounding at the ice on the pond to crack a hole through which some aggrieved-looking ducks might have access to water. Children-presumably his-were skimming around the edges of the pond with bone skates strapped to their boots.

Wistfully, Adelia paused to watch. The joy of skating had come to her late-not until she’d spent a winter in the fens, where iced rivers made causeways and playgrounds. Ulf had taught her. Fen people were wonderful skaters.

To skim away from here, free, letting the dead bury the dead. But even if it were possible, she could not leave while the person was at liberty who had hung Bertha up on a hook like a side of meat…

“You skate?” Cross asked, watching her.

“I do, but we have no skates,” she said.

As they approached the church, a dozen or so nuns, led by their prioress, came marching out of its doors like a line of disciplined, determined jackdaws.

They were heading for the convent gates and the bridge beyond, one of them pushing a two-wheeled cart. A sizable number of Godstow’s lay residents scurried behind them expectantly. Adelia saw Walt and Jacques among the followers and joined them; Cross went with her. As they passed the guesthouse, Gyltha came down its steps with Mansur, Allie cocooned in her arms. “Don’t want to miss this,” she said.

At the gates, Sister Havis’s voice came clear. “Open up, Fitchet, and bring me a knife.”

Outside, a path had been dug through the snow on the bridge to facilitate traffic between village and convent. Why, since it led to nowhere else, Lord Wolverscote had thought it necessary to put a sentry on it was anybody’s guess. But he had-and one who, facing a gaggle of black-clad, veiled women, each with a cross hanging on her chest, still found it necessary to ask, “Who goes there?”

Sister Havis advanced on him, as had Cross upon his fellow the night before. Adelia almost expected her to knock him out; she looked capable of it. Instead, the prioress pushed aside the leveled pike with the back of her hand and marched on.

“I wouldn’t arse about, friend,” Fitchet advised the sentry, almost sympathetically. “Not when they’re on God’s business.”

When she’d glimpsed the bodies from the boat, Adelia had been too cold, too scared, too occupied to consider the manner in which they’d been hanged-only the image of their dangling feet had stayed in her memory.

Now she saw it. The two men, their arms tied, had been stood on the bridge while one end of a rope was attached round each neck and the other to one of the bridge’s stanchions. Then they’d been thrown over the balustrade.

Bridges were communication between man and man, too sacred to be used as gallows. Adelia wished that Gyltha hadn’t brought Allie; this was not going to be a scene she wanted her daughter to watch. On the other hand, her child was looking around in a concentration of pleasure; the surrounding scenery was a change, a lovely change, from the alleys of the convent where she was taken for her daily outings in fresh air. The bridge formed part of a white tableau, its reflection in the sheeted river below was absolute, and the waterfall on its mill side had frozen in sculptured pillars.

The mill wheel beyond was motionless and glistened with icicles as if from a thousand stalactites. It was an obscenity for distorted death to decorate it. “Don’t let her see the bodies,” she told Gyltha.

“Get her used to it,” Gyltha said. “Her’ll see plenty of hangings as she grows. My pa took me to my first when I were three year old. Enjoyed it, too, I did.”

“I don’t want her to enjoy it.”

Getting the bodies up wasn’t going to be easy; they were weighted by accumulated ice, and the rope holding them was stretched so tightly over the balustrade that it had frozen to it.

Walt joined Adelia. “Prioress says we ain’t to help; they got to do it theyselves, seemingly.”

Sister Havis considered for a moment and then gave her orders. While one used Fitchet’s knife to scrape the ice from the ropes, the tallest of the nuns, the cellaress, leaned over, stretching her arm to grasp the hair of one of the hanging men. She lifted, giving the rope some slack.

A seagull that had been pecking at the man’s eyes flew off, yelping, into the clear sky. Allie watched it go.

“Haul, my sisters.” The prioress’s voice rang after it. “Haul for the mercy of Mary.”

A row of black backsides bent over the balustrade. They hauled, their breath streaming upward like smoke.

“What in hell are you women doing?”

Lord Wolvercote was on the bridge, to be no more regarded by the sisters than the seagull. He stepped forward, hand on his sword. Fitchet and Walt and some other men rolled up their sleeves. Wolvercote looked round. His sentry’s helpless shrug told him he would get no help against God’s female battalion. He was outnumbered. He shouted instead, “Leave them. This is my land, my half of the bridge, and villains shall hang from it as and when I see fit.”

“It’s our bridge, my lord, as you well know.” This was Fitchet, loud but weary with the repetition of an old argument. “And Mother Abbess don’t want it decorated with no corpses.”

One body was up now, too stiff to bend, so the sisters were having to lift it vertically over the balustrade, its cocked head angled inquiringly toward the man who had sentenced it to death.

The nuns laid him on the cart, then returned to the balustrade to raise his fellow.

The dispute had brought the miller’s family to their windows, and faces lined the sills to watch the puffs of air issuing like dragons’ breath from the two arguing men.

“They were rogues, you dolt. Thieves. In possession of stolen property, and I made an example of them, as I have a right to do by infangthief. Leave them alone.”

He was tall, dark-complexioned, age about thirty or so, and would have been handsome if his thin face hadn’t settled into lines of contempt that at the moment were emphasized by fury. Emma had talked joyously of her future husband’s poetry, but Adelia saw no poetry here. Only stupidity. He had made an example of the two thieves; they’d been hanging here for two days, and the river’s lack of traffic meant that anybody who was going to see them had already done it. A more sensible man would have bowed to the inevitable, given his blessing, and walked away.

Wolvercote can’t, Adelia thought. He sees the sisters as undermining his authority, and it frightens him; he must be cock of the heap or he is nothing.

Infangthief. She searched her memory-one of the English customary laws; Rowley had once mentioned it, told her, “Infangthief? Well, it’s a sort of legal franchise that certain lords of the manor hold by ancient right to pass the death penalty on thieves caught on their property. The king hates it. He says it means the buggers can hang anybody they’ve a mind to.”

“Why doesn’t he get rid of it, then?”

But ancient rights, apparently, were not to be discarded without resentment, even rebellion, by those who held them. “He will-in time.”

The second corpse had been retrieved, and sacking was laid over both. The nuns were beginning to push their loaded cart back across the bridge, their feet slipping on the ice.

“See, my duck,” Gyltha said to Allie. “That were fun, weren’t it?”

Sister Havis stopped as they passed Wolvercote, and her voice was colder than the dead men. “What were their names?”

“Names? What do you want their names for?”

“For their graves.”

“They didn’t have names, for God’s sake. They’d have gone on to take the chalice off your own damned altar if I hadn’t stopped them. They were thieves, woman.”

“So were the two crucified with Our Lord; I don’t remember Him withholding mercy from them.” The prioress turned and followed her sisters.

He couldn’t leave it. He called after her, “You’re an interfering old bitch, Havis. No wonder you never got a man.”

She didn’t look back.

“They’re going to bury them,” Adelia said. “Oh, dear.”