The Serpent’s Tale

Adelia had built a case against the lawyer. She had to keep reminding herself that somebody had passed on the information that led to killers waiting on the bridge for Talbot of Kidlington, and none was more likely than this little man, who said of Talbot, “We were closer than cousins. He was my younger brother after his parents died. I looked after him in everything.”

But while it was modest, his clothing was of a quality not to be expected of a family lawyer, and the large seal ring on his finger was entirely of gold; Master Warin did himself well. Also, his taste did not run to mead and ale; his grabs at the wine jug as it was passed round were frequent.

Adelia applied the spur. “Your cousin didn’t confide to you his intention to run away with Mistress Bloat, then?” she asked.

“Of course not.” Master Warin’s voice became sharp. “A lunatic idea. I would have dissuaded him from it. Lord Wolvercote is an important man. I would not have him shamed by one of my family.”

He was lying. Emma had said he’d been part of the elopement conspiracy.

“Did you know him, then? Wolvercote?”

“I did not.” Master Warin’s tongue wriggled around his lips. “We met in church the other night for the first time.”

Lying again. This was her man.

“I’d only wondered if you knew what your cousin was planning, because people are saying that you came here hot on his heels…”

“Who says that?”

“You arrived at the abbey so soon after…”

“That is a calumny. I was worried for my cousin traveling in the snow. Who are these slanderers? Who are you? I don’t need to sit here…” His tongue flickering like a snake’s, Master Waringrabbed his wine cup and moved away to find a seat farther down the table.

Mansur turned his head to watch the lawyer’s agitated progress. “Did he kill the boy?” he asked in Arabic.

“In a way. He told Wolvercote so that Wolvercote could kill him.”

“As guilty, then.”

“As if he shot the bolt himself, yes. He could have said he knew about the elopement and turned up at the abbey in order to stop it, thus explaining why he was so prompt on the scene. But he wouldn’t say that-I gave him the opportunity-because people would think he was in Wolvercote’s pocket, and he insists they never met. Actually, it wouldn’t condemn him if he said they had, but they conspired together to kill the boy, you see, and it’s warping his judgment. Guilt is making him distance himself from Wolvercote when he doesn’t need to.”

“He betrayed his own kin, Allah spit on him. Can we prove it?”

“We’ll try.” Adelia took Allie out of the sling and rubbed her cheek against her daughter’s downy head. How much more depressing was the banal ordinariness of a murderer like little Lawyer Warin than the brutality of a Wolvercote.

There was a sudden push, and she was shoved to one side by Cross taking the place that Warin had left and bringing with him the chill of outside. “Move up there.” The mercenary began reaching for dishes like a starving man.

“What have you been up to?” she asked.

“What you think I been up to? Marching up and down outside that bloody lockup. And a waste of bloody time that was. She’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“The demon. Abbot hisself told me she was a demon. Who’d you think?”

“Dakers? Dakers has gone?” She was on her feet, startling Allie, who’d been sucking the marrow of a beef bone. “Oh, dear God, they’ve taken her.”

Cross looked up at her, gravy dripping from his mouth. “What you on about? Nobody ain’t taken her. She’s vanished. That’s what demons do, they vanish.”

Adelia sat down. “Tell me.”

How it had been done, or even when, Cross couldn’t tell her, because he didn’t know; nobody knew. It hadn’t been discovered until a short while ago when, on instructions from the cellaress, a kitchen servant had brought a tray of Christmas food for its prisoner and Cross had used his key to open the lockup’s door.

“’S on a ring, the key is, see,” he said. “Each guard passes it on to the next one as takes over. Oswald passed it to me when I went on duty, an’ Walt’d passed it to him when he went on duty, and they both swears they never opened that bloody door, an’ I know I didn’t, not til I unlocked it just now…”

There was a pause while he scooped beef into his mouth.

“And?” Adelia asked, impatient.

“An’ so I fits the key in the lock, turns it, opens the door, and the boy goes in with the basket, and there she was…gone. Place as bare as a baby’s arse.”

“Somebody must have let her out.” Adelia was still worried.

“No, they bloody ain’t,” Cross said. “I tell you, nobody din’t open the bloody door til then. She’s vanished. ’S what demons do. Turned herself into a puff a smoke and out through one of the slits, that’s what she done.”

He’d called for Schwyz to come to the lockup, he said, nodding toward the empty space on the upper table where the mercenary leader had been sitting. Sister Havis, too, had been summoned.

“But, like I told ’em, you won’t find her a’cause she’s vanished, gone back to hell where she come from. What else you expect from a demon? Here he comes, look, shittin’ hisself six ways from Sunday.”

A scowling Schwyz had entered the barn and was striding up to the table where the Abbot of Eynsham sat next to the queen. All the diners were too busy carousing and eating to pay him any attention, except those to whom he had to deliver the news. Adelia saw that Eleanor merely raised her eyebrows, but the abbot immediately got to his feet; he seemed to be shouting, though the noise in the barn was too great for Adelia to hear him.

“He’s wanting the abbey searched,” Cross said, interpreting. “No bloody chance of that, though. Nobody ain’t leaving Yule food to go huntin’ a demon in the dark. I ain’t, I know that.”

So much was obvious. The abbot was talking urgently to Lord Wolvercote, who was shrugging him off like a man who didn’t care. Now he was appealing to the abbess, whose response, while more courteous, showed a similar refusal to be of help.

As she spread her hands to indicate the uselessness of interrupting the diners, Mother Edyve’s eyes rested for a moment without expression on Adelia’s across the room.

After all, I have the keys to the lockup.

“What you laughing at?” Cross asked.

“At a man hoist with his own petard.”

However the abbess had managed the escape, whichever of Dakers’s guards had been commanded to turn a blind eye, the Abbot of Eynsham could neither accuse nor punish. He was the one who, in locking her up, had demonized Rosamund’s housekeeper; he could not now complain if, as Cross said, she had done what demons did.

Still grinning, Adelia leaned forward to tell Gyltha, who was on the Arab’s other side, what had happened.

“Good luck to the old gargoyle.” Gyltha took another swig from her beaker; she’d been imbibing with energy for some time.

Mansur said in Arabic, “Convent men have been digging a path through the snow down to the river. The abbess ordered it. I overheard the man Fitchet say it was so that the queen could go skating on the ice. Now I think that they have been making an escapeway for Rosamund’s woman.”

“They’ve let her leave? In this weather?” It wasn’t funny anymore. “I thought they’d hide her somewhere in the abbey.”

Mansur shook his head. “It is too crowded, she would be found. She will survive if Allah wills it. It is not far to Oxford.”

“She won’t go to Oxford.”

There was only one place Dame Dakers would be making for.

For the rest of the meal and as the tables were put aside to clear the barn for dancing, Adelia thought of the river and the woman who would be following its course northward. Would the ice hold her? Could she survive the cold? Had the abbot, who would know where she was heading, sent men and dogs after her?

Mansur, looking at her, said, “Allah protects the insane. He will decide whether the woman lives or dies.”