The Serpent’s Tale

walking stick, her chin on her hands.

Adelia got up. She said, “I have intruded, Mother. I’ll go.”

The voice alighted on her as she made for the door. “Emma was nine years old when she came to Godstow, bringing joy to us all.”

Adelia turned back. “No joy now, not for her, not for you,” she said.

Unexpectedly, Mother Edyve asked, “How is Queen Eleanor taking the news?”

“With fury.” Because she was sour with a fury of her own, Adelia said, “Angry because Wolvercote has flaunted her, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Mother Edyve rubbed her chin against her folded hands. “You are unjust, I think.”

“To Eleanor? What can she do except rant? What can any of us do? Your joyful child’s enslaved for life to a pig, and even the Queen of England is helpless.”

“I have been listening to the songs they sing to her, to the queen,” Mother Edyve said. “The viol and the young men’s voices-I have been sitting here and thinking about them.”

Adelia raised her eyebrows.

“What is it they sing of?” Mother Edyve asked. “Cortez amors?”

“Courtly love. A Provencal phrase. Provencal fawning and sentimental rubbish.”

“Courtly love, yes. A serenade to the unattainable lady. It is most interesting-earthly love as ennoblement. We could say, could we not, that what those young men yearn for is a reflected essence of the Holy Mary.”

Silly old soul, thought Adelia, savagely. “What those young men yearn for, Abbess, is not holiness. This song will end in a high-flown description of the secret arcade. It’s their name for the vagina.”

“Sex, of course,” said the abbess, amazingly, “but with a gentler longing than I have ever heard ascribed to it. Oh, yes, basically, they are singing to more than they know; they sing to God the Mother.”

“God the Mother?”

“God is both our father and our mother. How could it be otherwise? To create two sexes yet favor only one would be lopsided parentage, though Father Egbert chides me for saying so.”

No wonder Father Egbert chided; it was a wonder he didn’t excommunicate. God masculine and feminine?

Adelia, who considered herself a modern thinker, was confounded by a perception of an Almighty who, in every religion she knew of, had created weak and sinful woman for man’s pleasure, human ovens in which to bake his seed. A devout Jew thanked God daily that he had not been born female. Yet this little nun was plucking the beard from God’s chin and providing Him not only with the breasts but also with the mind of a female.

It was a philosophy of most profound rebellion. But now that Adelia came to consider her, Mother Edyve was a rebel, or she would not have been prepared to flout the Church by giving space in her graveyard to the body of a king’s whore. Only independence of mind could at the same time be extending charitable thought to a queen who had brought nothing but turbulence into the abbey with her.

“Yes,” the birdlike voice went on, “we grieve for the lopsidedness of the world as the Almighty Feminine must grieve for it. Yet God’s time is not our time, we are told; an age is but a blink of an eye to one who is Alpha and Omega.”

“Ye-es.” Frowning, Adelia moved nearer and sat sideways on the chancel steps, hugging her knees, staring at the still figure in the stall.

“I have been thinking that in Eleanor we are witnessing a blink,” it said.

“Eh?”

“Yes, for the first time to my knowledge, we have a queen who has raised her voice for the dignity of women.”

“Eh?”

“Listen,” the abbess said.

The trouvere in the cloister had finished composing his song. Now he was singing it, the lovely tenor of his voice flowing into the gray chapel like honey. “Las! einssi ay de ma mort exemplaire, mais la doleur qu’il me convendra traire, douce seroit, se un tel espoir avoie…”

If the singer was dying of love, he’d chosen to set his pain to a melody as pretty as springtime. Despite herself, Adelia smiled; the combination ought to win him his lady, all right.

“…Dame, et se ja mes cuers riens entreprent, don’t mes corps ait honneur n’avancement, De vous venracom loneins que vos soie…”

So if his heart ever undertook anything that would bring him honor, it would come from the beloved, however far away she was.

The music that attended Eleanor wherever she went had, to Adelia’s indiscriminatory ear, been another of her affectations, the incipient background of a woman with every frailty ascribed to the feminine nature: vain, jealous, flighty, one who, in order to assert herself, had chosen to go to war to challenge a man greater than she was.

Yet the abbess was attending to it as if to holy script.

Attending to it with her, Adelia reconsidered. She’d dismissed the elaborate, sighing poetry of the male courtiers, their interest in dress, their perfumed curls, because she judged them by the standard of rough masculinity set by a rough male world. Was regard for gentleness and beauty decadent? Rowley, she thought, with a tearing rush of fondness, would say that it was-he loathed femininity in men; he equated his messenger’s liking for scent with the worst excesses of the Emperor Caligula.

Eleanor’s version, though, could hardly be decadence, because it was new. Adelia sat up. By God, it was new. The abbess was right; deliberately or not, the queen was carrying into the uncultured farmyard of her domains an image of women demanding respect, people to be considered and cherished for their personal value rather than as marketable goods. It demanded that men deserve women.

For a moment back there in the queen’s apartment, Eleanor had held Wolvercote up to her courtiers, not as a powerful male gaining what was his but as a brute beast dragging its prey into the forest to be gnawed.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said, almost reluctantly.

“…vous que j’aim tres loyaument…Ne sans amours, emprendre nel saroie.”

“But it’s a pretense, it’s artificial,” Adelia protested. “Love, honor, respect. When are they ever extended to everyday women? I doubt if that boy actually practices what he’s singing. It’s…it’s a pleasant hypocrisy.”

“Oh, I have a high regard for hypocrisy,” the little nun said. “It pays lip service to an ideal which must, therefore, exist. It recognizes that there is a Good. In its own way, it is a token of civilization. You don’t find hypocrisy among the beasts of the field. Nor in Lord Wolvercote.”

“What good does the Good do if it is not adhered to?”

“That is what I have been wondering,” Mother Edyve said calmly. “And I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the early Christians wondered it, too, and perhaps that Eleanor, in her fashion, has made a start by setting a brick in a foundation on which, with God’s help, our daughters’ daughters can begin to build a new and better Jerusalem.”

“Not in time for Emma,” Adelia said.

“No.”

Perhaps, Adelia thought drearily, it was only a very old woman who could look hopefully on a single brick laid in a wasteland.

They sat a while longer, listening. The singer had changed his tune and his theme. “I would hold thee naked in my arms at eve, that we might be in ecstasy, my head against thy breast…”

“That, too, is love of a sort, nevertheless,” Mother Edyve said, “and perhaps all one to our Great Parent, who made our bodies as they are.”

Adelia smiled at her, thinking of being in bed with Rowley. “I have been convinced that it is.”

“So have I, which speaks well for the men we have loved.” There was a reflective sigh. “But don’t tell Father Egbert.”

The abbess got up with difficulty and tested her legs.

Warmed, Adelia went to help her settle her cloak. “Mother,” she said on impulse, “I am afraid for Dame Dakers’s safety.”

A heavily veined little hand flapped her away; Mother Edyve had become impatient to go. “You are a busy soul,