Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

“You devil,” she said.

“Maybe, but this devil will save its king and its country or die trying.”

“Or kill me in the process.” Stop it, she thought, stop sounding like a wronged woman; it was your decision.

He shrugged. “You’ll be safe enough, nobody’s out to poison you. You’ll have Gyltha and Mansur-God help anyone who touches you while they’re around-and I’m sending servants along. I presume that canine eyesore goes, too?”

“Yes,” she said. “His name’s Ward.”

“One more of the prior’s finds to keep you safe? I remember Safeguard.”

Another creature that had died saving her life. The room was full of memories that hurt-and with the dangerous value of being shared.

“Paton is my watchdog,” he said conversationally. “He guards my virtue like a bloody chastity belt. Incidentally, wait until you see Fair Rosamund’s labyrinth-biggest in Christendom. Mind you, wait til you see Fair Rosamund herself, she’s not what you’d expect. In fact-”

She interrupted. “Is it at risk?”

“The labyrinth?”

“Your virtue.”

All at once, he was being kind. “Oddly enough, it isn’t. I thought when you turned me down…but God was kind and tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.”

“And when Henry needed a compliant bishop.” Stop it, stop it.

“And the world needed a doctor, not another wife,” he said, still kind. “I see that now; I have prayed to see it; marriage would have wasted you.”

Yes, yes. If she had agreed to marriage, he’d have refused the bishopric the king had urged on him for political expediency, but for her, there had been the higher priority of her calling. She’d have had to abandon it-he’d demanded a wife, not a doctor, especially not a doctor to the dead.

In the end, she thought, neither of us would bestow the ultimate, sacrificial gift on the other.

He got up and went to the baby, making the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. “Bless you, my daughter.” He turned back. “Bless you, too, mistress,” he said. “God keep you both safe, and may the peace of Jesus Christ prevail over the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” He sighed. “For I can hear the sound of their hooves.”

Father Paton came in carrying a basket and gave it to his lordship, who then gestured for him to leave.

Adelia was still staring at Rowley. Among all this room’s superfluity of wealth, the turmoil she’d experienced in it as shades of the past came and went, one thing that should belong to it-its very purpose-had been missing; she had just caught its scent, clear and cold: sanctity, the last attribute she’d expected to find in him. Her lover had become a man of God.

He took the chair beside her to give her details of the attempt on Rosamund’s life, putting the basket in front of her so that she could examine its contents. In the old days, he couldn’t have sat beside her without touching her; now it was like sitting next to a hermit.

Rosamund loved stewed mushrooms, he told her; it was well known. A lazy servant, out gathering them for her mistress, had been handed some by an old, unidentified woman, a crone, and had taken them back without bothering to pick more.

“Rosamund didn’t eat them all, some had been kept for later, and while I was with her I took the remainder to bring with me. I thought you might be able to identify the area they came from or something-you know about mushrooms, don’t you?”

Yes, she knew about mushrooms. Obediently, Adelia began turning them over with her knife while he talked.

It was a fine collection, though withering now: boletes that the English called Slippery Jack, winter oysters, cauliflower, blewits, hedgehogs. All very tasty but extraordinarily, most extraordinarily, varied; some of these species grew exclusively on chalk, some under pine trees, others in fields, others in broadleaf woodland.

Deliberately or not, whoever gathered these had spread the net wide and avoided picking a basketful that could be said to come from a specific location.

“As I say, it was quite deliberate,” the bishop was saying. “The crone, whoever she was, made a point of it-they were for the Lady Rosamund, nobody else. Whoever that crone was, she hasn’t been seen since. Disappeared. Slipped in a couple of malignant ones, do you see, hoping they’d poison the poor woman, and it’s only through the mercy of God…”

“She’s dead, Rowley,” Adelia said.

“What?”

“If these fungi duplicate what Rosamund ate, she’s dead.”

“No, I told you, she recovered. Much better when I left her.”

“I know.” Adelia was suddenly so sorry for him; if she could have changed what she was going to say, she would have. “But it’s what happens, I’m afraid.” She speared the killer with her knife and lifted it. “It’s a feature of this one that those who eat it apparently get better for a while.”

Innocuous-looking, white-gilled, its cap now aged into an ordinary brown but still retaining a not unpleasant smell. “It’s called the Death Cap. It grows everywhere; I’ve seen it in Italy, Sicily, France, here in England; I’ve seen its effect, I’ve worked on the corpses who ate it-too many of them. It is always, always fatal.”

“No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but if she ate one of these, even a tiny bite…” He had to know. “Sickness and diarrhea at first, abdominal pain, and then a day or two when she’d seem to be recovering. But all the while the poison was attacking her liver and kidneys. There’s absolutely no cure. Rowley, I’m afraid she’s gone.”

N o question now of the bishop crossing from England to Normandy in order to calm a turbulent king. The king’s beloved was dead, and the king would be coming to England himself, riding the air like a demon to ravage and burn-maybe, in his rage, to kill his own wife if he could find her.

So, at dawn, the bishop rode, too, another demon loose on the world, to be ahead of the king, to find the queen and get her away, to be on the spot, to locate the real culprit, to be able to say: “My lord, hold your hand; this is Rosamund’s killer.”

To avoid Armageddon.

With the bishop went those for his purpose, a pitiful few compared to his lordship’s usual train: two men-at-arms, a groom, a secretary, a messenger, a carriage, horses, and remounts. Also an Arab doctor, a dog, two women, and a baby-and to hell if they couldn’t keep up.

They kept up. Just. Their carriage, Father Paton’s “conveyance,” was splendidly carved, enclosed against the weather by purple waxed cloth with matching cushions among the straw inside, but it was not intended for speed. After three hours of it, Gyltha said that if she stayed in the bugger much longer she’d lose her teeth from rattling, and the poor baby its brains.

So they transferred to horses, young Allie being placed and padded into a pannier like a grub in a cocoon; Ward, the dog, was stuffed less gently into the other. The change was made quickly to stay up with the bishop, who wouldn’t wait for them.

Jacques the messenger was sent ahead to prepare the bishop’s palace at Saint Albans for their brief stay overnight and, then, next day, to the Barleycorn at Aylesbury for another.

It was cold, becoming colder the farther west they went, as if Henry Plantagenet’s icy breath were on their neck and getting closer.

They didn’t reach the Barleycorn, because that was the day it began to snow, and they left the roads for the Icknield Way escarpment, where avenues of trees and the chalk under their horses’ hooves made the going easier and therefore faster.