The Serpent’s Tale

“Dear God.” With a handkerchief to his nose, the abbot hurried around the room, blowing out candles and opening the windows. “Dear God, the whore stinks. Dear God.”

Moist, gray air refreshed the chamber slightly.

Eynsham came back to the bed, his eyes fascinated.

“Leave her,” Adelia advised him.

He whipped the cloak off the body and let it fall to the floor.

“Aach.”

Her lovely hair fanned out from the decomposing face onto a pillow, with another pillow propping her crown near the top of her head. The crossed hands on her breast were mercifully hidden by a prayer book. Feet bulged wetly out of the tiny gold slippers that peeped from under the graceful, carefully arranged folds of a gown as blue as a spring sky. Patches of ooze were staining its silk.

“My, my,” said the abbot, softly. “Sic transit Rosa Mundi. So the rose of all the world rots like any other…Rosamund the Foul…”

“Don’t you dare,” Adelia shouted at him. If she’d had her hands free, she’d have hit him. “Don’t you dare mock her. You brought her to this, and, by God, this is what you’ll come to-your soul with it.”

“Oof.” He stepped back like a child faced by a furious parent. “Well, it’s a horror… admit it’s a horror.”

“I don’t care. You treat her with respect.”

For a moment he was wrong-footed by his own lapse in taste. Tentatively, standing well back from the bed, his hand traced a blessing in the air toward it. “Requiescat in pace.” After a moment, he said, “What is that white stuff growing out of her face?”

“Grave wax,” Adelia told him. Actually, it was very interesting; she’d not seen it on a human flesh before, only on that of a sow at the death farm.

For a moment she was a mistress in the art of death again, aware only of the phenomenon in front of her, vaguely irritated that lack of time and means were preventing her from examining it.

It’s because she was fat, she thought. The sow in Salerno had been fat, and Gordinus had kept it in an airtight tin chest away from flies. “You see, my child? Bereft of insects, this white grease-I call it corpus adipatus-will accrete on plumper areas, cheeks, breasts, buttocks, et cetera, and hold back putrefaction, yes, actually delay it. Though whether it causes the delay or the delay causes it is yet to be determined.”

Bless him, Gordinus had called it a marvel, which it was, and damn it that she was seeing it manifest on a human corpse only now.

It was especially interesting that the room’s new warmth was, to judge from what was seeping through Rosamund’s gown, bringing on putrefaction at the selfsame time. That couldn’t be caused by flies-could it?-there were none at this time of year…blast it, if her hands were free, she could find out what was breeding under the material…

“Oh, what?” she asked, crossly. The abbot was pulling at her.

“Where does she keep the letters?”

“What letters?” This opportunity to advance knowledge might never come again. If it wasn’t flies…

He swung her round to face him. “Let me explain the position to you, my dear. In all this I have only been pursuing my Christian duty to bring down a king who had the good Saint Thomas murdered on the steps of his own cathedral. I intended a civil war that our gracious queen would win. Since that outcome now seems unlikely, I need to retrieve my position because, if Henry finds my letters, Henry will send them to the Pope. And will the Holy Father sanction what I have done to punish the wicked? Will he say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful Robert of Eynsham, you have advanced our great cause’? He will not. He must pretend outrage, because a worthless whore was poisoned in the process. He will wash his Pilate’s hands. Will there be oak leaves? Reward? Ah, no.”

He stopped savoring the sound of his own voice. “Find those letters for me, mistress, or when Henry comes he will discover in the ashes of his bordello the bones of not just one of his harlots but two.” He was diverted by a happy thought. “Together, in each other’s arms, perhaps. Yes, perhaps…”

He mustn’t see that she was afraid; he mustn’t see that she was afraid. “In that case, the letters will be burned, too,” she said.

“Not if the bitch kept them in a metal box. Where are they? You had one, mistress, and were quick enough to show it around.

Where did she keep the letters?”

“On the table, I took it from the table.”

“If she kept one, she kept more.” He shouted for the housekeeper again. “Dakers. She’ll know. Where is the hellhag?”

And then Adelia knew where Dakers was.

All the visits he’d made to this room, and he’d never known he was observed from a garderobe with a spy hole. He didn’t know now.

Eynsham was examining the table, sweeping its writing implements aside, sending the ancient bowl in which Rosamund had kept sweetmeats onto the floor, where it broke. He bent to look under the table. There was a grunt of satisfaction. He came up holding a crumpled piece of vellum. “Is this all there was?”

“How could I know?” It was the letter Rosamund had been writing to the queen, that Eleanor in her fury had thrown to the floor. Adelia had given the abbot’s template to poor Father Paton and, if she died for it, she wasn’t going to tell this man that there were others hidden in a box stool only inches from his right boot.

Let him doubt, let there be a worm of worry for as long as he lives.

Great God, he’s reading it.

The abbot had lumbered to the open window and was holding the parchment to the light. “Such an appalling hand the trollop had,” he said. “Still, it’s amazing she could write at all.”

And let Dakers doubt him. No wonder the housekeeper had laughed as they were taken to the boats that night; she’d seen Eynsham, who had always been Rosamund’s friend and, therefore, would be a friend to her.

If she was listening now, if she could be got to switch sides…

Adelia raised her voice. “Why did you make Rosamund write letters to Eleanor?”

The abbot lowered the parchment, partly exasperated, partly amused. “Listen to the creature. Why does she ask a question when her brain cannot possibly encompass the answer? What use to tell you? How can you even approach in understanding the exigencies that we, God’s agents, are put to in order to keep His world on its course, the descent we must make into the scum, the instruments we must use-harlots like that one on the bed, cutthroats, all the sweepings of the cesspit, to achieve a sacred aim.”

He was telling her anyway. A wordy man. A man needing the reassurance of his own voice and, even more, the sanctification of what he had done.

And still hopeful. It surprised her. That he was having to abandon his great game as a lost cause and desert his championship of Eleanor was stimulating him, as if certain he could retrieve the situation with charm, tactics, a murder here or there, using the false urbanity, his common-man-with-learning, all the air in the balloon that had bounced him into the halls of popes and royalty…

A mountebank, really, Adelia thought.

Also a virgin. Mansur had seen it, told her, but Mansur, with the superiority of a man who could hold an erection, had discounted the agony of supposed failure turned to malevolence. Another churchman might bless a condition that ensured his chastity, but not this one; he wanted, lusted after, that most natural and commonplace gift that he was denied.

Perhaps he was making the world pay for it, meddling with brilliance in high politics, pushing men and women round his chess board, discarding this one, moving that one, compensating himself for the appalling curiosity that kept him outside their Garden of Eden as he jumped up and down in an effort to see inside it.

“To stimulate war, my dear,” he was saying. “Can you understand that? Of course you can’t-you are the clay from which you were made and the clay to which you will return. A war to cleanse the land of a barbarous and unclean king. To avenge poor Becket. To return England to God’s writ.”

“Rosamund’s letters would do all that?” she asked.