The Serpent’s Tale

Together, they carried the cradle into the room; the child in it was still asleep and wrapped in her blankets. She seemed to have taken no harm from being left in the cold.

The candle had gone out. Gyltha sat unmoving in the chair on which she had been waiting for Adelia to come back. For an appalling moment, Adelia thought she’d been murdered-the woman’s hand was dangling over the place where the cradle always lay.

A snore reassured her.

The three of them sat in a huddled group around the cradle, watching Allie sleep, as if afraid she would evaporate.

“Someone come in here and stole her? Put her on the step?” Gyltha couldn’t get over it.

“Yes,” Adelia told her. One inch farther on the step, just one inch…In her mind she kept seeing the cradle turn in midair as it fell into the alley some twenty feet below.

“Someone come in here? And I never heard un? Put her out on the step?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Where’s the sense in it?”

“I don’t know.” But she did.

Mansur voiced it: “He is warning you.”

“I know.”

“You ask too many questions.”

“I know.”

“What questions?” Gyltha, in her panic, wasn’t keeping up. “Who don’t want you asking questions?”

“I don’t know.” If she had, she would have groveled to him, squirmed at his feet in supplication. You’ve won. You’re cleverer than I am. Go free, I won’t interfere. But leave me Allie.

ELEVEN

The instinct was to hide with Allie in the metaphorical long grass, like a hare and leveret in their form.

When the queen sent Jacques to inquire for her, Adelia sent back that she was ill and could not come.

The killer conversed with her in her head.

How submissive are you now?

Submissive, my lord. Totally submissive. I shall do nothing to displease you, just don’t hurt Allie.

She knew him now, not who he was but what he was. Even as he’d plucked Allie’s cradle from under the sleeping Gyltha’s hand and put it on the steps, he’d revealed himself.

Such a simple expedient to reduce his opponent to impotence. If she didn’t fear him so much, she could admire it-the audacity, the economy, the imagination of it.

And it had told her for which killings he had been responsible.

There had been two lots of murder, she knew that now, neither one having anything to do with the other; only the fact that she’d witnessed the corpses of both within a short time had given them a seeming relationship.

Talbot of Kidlington’s death was the most straightforward, because it had been for the oldest of reasons: gain.

Wolvercote had good reason to kill the boy; the elopement with Emma would have deprived him of a valuable bride.

Or the inheritance Talbot had gained on his twenty-first birthday would have deprived his guardian of an income, for Master Warin could have been defrauding the boy-it wasn’t unknown for an heir to come into his estates only to find that they’d gone.

Or, and this was a possibility Emma herself had raised while not believing it, Fitchet had alerted two friends to the fact that a young man would be arriving at the convent by night with money in his purse. After all, the gatekeeper had been acting as go-between for the two lovers-presumably for a fee-which indicated he was corruptible.

Or-the least likely-the Bloats had discovered their daughter’s plan and had hired killers to prevent it.

Such was Talbot’s murder.

Yet not one on the list of his likely killers fitted the character of the man who’d crept into the guesthouse and put Allie’s cradle on the steps outside. The smell of him was different, it had none of the direct brutality with which Talbot had been eliminated.

No, this man was…what? Sophisticated? Professional? I do not kill unless I must. I have given you a warning. I trust you will heed it.

He was the murderer of Rosamund and Bertha.

There was more snow. The sides of the track that had been dug down to the Thames fell in under it.

It was left to Gyltha to fetch their meals from the kitchen, to empty their chamber pots in the latrine, and to gather firing from the woodpile.

“Ain’t we ever a’going to take that poor baby for some air?” she wanted to know.

“No.”

I am outside, watching. How submissive are you?

Totally submissive, my lord. Don’t hurt my child.

“Nobody can’t snatch her, not with that old Arab along of us.”

“No.”

“We stay here, then, with the door barred?”

“Yes.”

But of course, they couldn’t…

The first alarm came at night. Somewhere a handbell was ringing and people were shouting.

Gyltha leaned out of the window to the alley. “They’re yellin’ fire,” she said. “I can smell smoke. Oh, dear Lord, preserve us.”

Bundling Allie into her furs, they dressed themselves, snatching up what belongings they could before carrying her down the steps.

Fire, that greatest of threats, had brought out everybody on this side of the abbey. Fitchet came running from the gates carrying two buckets; men were emerging out of the guesthouse: Mansur, Master Warin.

“Where is it? Where is it?”

The ringing and hubbub was coming from the direction of the pond.

“Barn?”

“Lockup, sounds like.”

“Oh, God,” Adelia said. “Dakers.” She handed Allie to Gyltha and began running.

Between the pond and the lockup, Peg was swinging a bell as if she were thwacking an unruly cow with it. She’d seen the flames on her way to the milking. “Up there.” She pointed with the bell toward the narrow slit that allowed air into the little beehive building of stone that was the convent lockup.

Volunteers, already forming a line, shouted to hasten the smith as he hammered an iron spar into the pond to gain water for their pails.

Mansur came up beside Adelia. “I smell no fire.”

“Neither do I.” There was a slight smitch in the air, nothing more, and no flames apparent in the lockup’s