The Serpent’s Tale

Jacques, nearby, grinned at her. “It’s a fairly usual custom with the dead,” he said.

“Yes, but I didn’t look at their boots. And you,” she said to Gyltha. “Take that child home.” She hurried after the nuns and delayed the cart by standing in front of it. “Would you mind? Just a minute?”

She knelt down in the snow so that her eyes were on a level with the legs of the corpses and raised the sacking.

She was transferred to the bridge when she had first seen it, at nighttime, when the awful burden it carried and the footprints in its snow had told her the sequence of murder as clearly as if the two killers had confessed to it.

She heard her own voice speaking to Rowley: “See? One wears hobnails, the other’s boots have bars across the soles, maybe clogs bound with strips. They arrived here on horseback and took their horses into those trees… They ate as they waited…”

Facing her was a pair of stout hobnailed boots. The other corpse had lost the footwear from its right foot, but the clog on its left had been retained by the tight bands of leather passing under the sole and cross-gartered around the lower leg.

Carefully, she replaced the sacking and stood up. “Thank you.”

Nonplussed, the nuns with the cart continued on their way. Sister Havis’s eyes met Adelia’s for a moment. “Were they the ones?”

“Yes.”

Walt overheard. “Here, is these the buggers as done for that poor horse?”

Adelia smiled at him. “And the traveler. Yes, I think so.” She turned and found that Wolvercote had approached to see what she’d been up to. The crowd of abbey people waited to hear the exchange.

“Do you know where they came from?” she asked him.

“What do you care where they came from? I found them robbing my house; they had a silver cup, my silver cup, and that’s all I needed to know.” He turned to the porter. “Who is this female? What’s she doing here?”

“Came with the bishop,” Fitchet told him shortly.

Walt piped up, proprietorially: “She’s with the darky doctor. She can tell things, she can. Looks at things and knows what happened.”

It was badly phrased. Adelia hunched as she waited for the inevitable.

Wolvercote looked at her. “A witch, then,” he said.

The word dropped into the air like ink into pristine water, discoloring it, webbing it with black, spiky traces before graying it forever.

Just as the allusion to Havis as a frustrated virgin would be a label that stuck to her, so the surrounding people hearing the name “witch” applied to Adelia would always remember it. The word that had stoned and set fire to women. There was no appeal against it. It tinged the faces of the men and women listening. Even Jacques’s and Walt’s showed a new doubt.

She castigated herself. Lord, what a fool; why didn’t I wait? She could have found some other opportunity to look at the men’s boots before they were buried. But no, she’d had to make sure immediately. Thoughtless, thoughtless.

“Damn it,” she said. “Damn.” She looked back. Lord Wolvercote had gone, but everybody else was looking in her direction; she could hear the murmurs. The damage had been done.

Breathily, Jacques came loping up to her. “I don’t think you’re a witch, mistress. Just stay in your room, eh? Out of sight, out of mind. Like Saint Matthew says: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”

But the day was not gone yet. As they passed through the gates of the convent, a fat man, wild-eyed, emerged out of the church door farther along. He gestured at Jacques. “You,” he shouted, “fetch the infirmaress.”

The messenger went running. The fat man turned and rushed back into the church.

Adelia teetered outside. ‘Sufficient unto the day…’ There’s been enough evil, and you’ve brought some of it on yourself. Whatever this is, it is not for you.

But the sounds coming from inside the building were of distress.

She went in.

The sunshine was managing poorly within the large church, where, by day, candles were unlit. Glacial shafts of sun were lancing into the dark interior from the high, narrow windows above the clerestory, splashing a pillar here and there and cutting across the nave in thin stripes that avoided the middle, where the distress was centered.

Until her eyes adjusted to the contrast, Adelia couldn’t make out what was happening. Slowly, it took shape. There was a catafalque, and two burly figures, a male and a female, were trying to drag something off it.

The something-she could see it now-was young Emma, very still, but her hands were gripping the far side of the catafalque so that her body could not be shifted away from the body that lay beneath her.

“Leave un, girl. Come on up now. ’Tis shameful, this. Gor dang it, what be it with her?” The fat man’s voice.

The woman’s was kinder but no less disturbed. “Yere, yere, don’t take on like this, my duck, you’m upsetting your pa. What’s this dead un to you? Come on up now.”

The fat man looked around in desperation and caught sight of Adelia standing in the doorway, illuminated by the sun behind her. “Here, you, come and give us a hand. Reckon our girl’s fainted.”

Adelia moved closer. Emma hadn’t fainted; her eyes were wide and stared at nothing. She had thrown herself so that she lay arched over the corpse under her. The knuckles of her gripping hands were like tiny white pebbles against the black wood of the catafalque beneath it.

Going closer still, Adelia peered down.

The nuns had put coins over the eyes, but the face was the face of the dead young man on the bridge, whom she and Rowley had lowered into the icehouse. This was Master Talbot of Kidlington.

Only minutes before, she had been examining the boots of his murderers.

She became aware that the fat man was blustering-though not at her. “Fine convent this is, leaving dead people round the place. It’s right upset our girl, and I don’t wonder. Is this what we pay our tithes for?”

The infirmaress had come into the church, Jacques with her. Exclamation and exhortation created a hubbub that had an echo, Sister Jennet’s crisp pipe-“Now, now, child, this will not do”-interspersed with the bellows of the father, who was becoming outraged and looking for someone to blame, while the mother’s anxiety made a softer counterpoint to them both.

Adelia touched Emma’s clawed hand, gently. The girl raised her head, but what she saw with those tormented eyes Adelia couldn’t tell. “Do you see what they’ve done? To him, to him?”

The father and Sister Jennet were standing away now, openly quarreling. The mother had stopped attending to her daughter in order to join in.

“Control yourself, Master Bloat. Where else should we have lain a body but in a church?” Sister Jennet did not add that as far as Godstow and bodies were concerned, they were running out of space.

“Not where a man can fall over it; that’s not what we pay our tithes for.”

“That’s right, Father, that’s right…” This was Mistress Bloat. “We was just being shown round, wasn’t us? Our girl was showing us round.”

Emma’s eyes still stared into Adelia’s as if into the Pit. “Do you see, oh, God, do you see?”

“I see,” Adelia told her.

And she did, wondering how she could have been so blind not to see it before. So that was why Talbot of Kidlington had been murdered.

TEN

Where were you going to elope to?”

“Wales.”