Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

For the baby’s sake as well as their own, the women were forced to reenter the carriage and stay there. Father Paton had already done so, complaining that if he stayed in the cold he would lose the use of his secretarial writing hand.

They hooked one of the lanterns to the arch over their heads and began heaping straw to make a bed, tucking Allie between them to benefit from the heat of their bodies. The cold lanced in like needles through the eyelets where the canopy was tied to its struts, so icy that it nullified the smell of the straw and even of the dog at their feet.

They were going at walking pace-Mansur was leading the horses-but deep pits in the track concealed by snow caused the carriage to fall and tip with bone-jarring suddenness so that rest was impossible. In any case, anxiety for what the others were suffering outside precluded sleep.

Gyltha said admiringly of Rowley, “He ain’t a’going to stop, is he?”

“No.” This was a man who’d pursued a murderer across the deserts of Outremer. An English blizzard wasn’t going to defeat him. Adelia said, “Have no concern for him: He’s showing none for…” There was a lurch of the carriage, and she grabbed at a strut with her right hand and her baby with her left to stop them being thrown from one side to the other. The lantern swung through an arc of one hundred eighty degrees, and Gyltha lunged upward to snuff out its candle in case it set fire to the canopy.

“…us,” Adelia finished.

In the darkness and at an angle, they could hear Father Paton praying for deliverance while, outside, screeching Arabic curses rained on horses that refused to pull. One or another was effective; after another grinding jerk, the carriage went on.

“You see,” came Gyltha’s voice, as if resuming a conversation, “Rowley, he remembers the war betwixt Matilda and Stephen. He’s a youngster compared to me, but he was born into it, and his parents, they’d have lived through it, like I did. King Stephen, he died natural in his bed. And Queen Matilda, she’s still going strong. But the war betwixt them…weren’t so for us commoners. We died over and over. It was like…like we was all tossed in the air and stayed there with nothing to hold to. The law went, ever’thing went. My pa, he was dragged off his fields one day to build a castle for Hugh Bigod. Never came back. Took three years a’fore we heard he was crushed flat when a stone fell. We near starved without un.”

Adelia heard the deep intake of breath, heavier than a sigh. Simple sentences, she thought, but what weight they carried.

Gyltha said, “We lost our Em an’ all. Older than me she was, about eleven. Some mercenaries came through and Ma ran with my brothers and me to hide in the fen, but they caught Em. She was screaming when they galloped off with her, I can hear her now. Never did find out what happened, but she was another as didn’t come back.”

It was a lecture. Adelia had heard Gyltha talk about the thirteen-year war before, but only in general terms, never like this; as witness to its chaos, the old woman was calling up specters that still gave her pain. Feudalism might be harsh for those at its bottom end, but it was at least a protection. Adelia, who had been brought up both protected and privileged, was being told what happened when order crumbled and civilization went with it.

“Nor it weren’t no good praying to God. He weren’t listening.”

Men gave way to basest instincts, Gyltha said. Village lads, decent enough if controlled, saw those controls disappear and themselves became thieves and rapists. “Henry Plantagenet, now, he may be all sorts, but with him a’coming king it stopped, d’you see. It stopped; the ground was put back under us. The crops grew like they had, the sun come up of a morning and set of nights, like it should.”

“I see,” Adelia said.

“But you can’t know , not really,” Gyltha told her. “Rowley do. His ma and pa, they was commoners, and they lived through it like I did. He’ll move mountains so’s it don’t happen again. He’s seeing to it so’s my Ulf, bless him, can go to school with a full belly as nobody’ll slit open. Bit of traveling? Few snowflakes? What’s that?”

“I’ve only been thinking of myself, haven’t I?” Adela said.

“And the baby,” Gyltha said, reaching over to pat her. “And a fair bit of his lordship, I reckon. Me, I’ll follow where he goes and happy to help.”

She had raised their venture to a plane that left Adelia ashamed and exposed to her own resentment. Even now, she couldn’t give credence to the reasoning that caused them to be doing what they were doing, but if the bishop, who did, was right and they could prevent civil war by it, then she, too, must be happy to give of her best.

And I am, she thought, grimacing. Ulf is safe at school; Gyltha and Mansur and my child are with me. I am happy that Bishop Rowley is happy in a God who has taken away his lusts. Where else should I be?

She shut her eyes and gave herself up to patient endurance.

Another great lurch woke her. They’d stopped. The canvas was lifted, letting in a draft of wicked cold and showing a face blue and bearded by ice. She recognized it as the messenger’s; they had caught up with him. “Are we there?”

“Nearly, mistress.” Jacques sounded excited. “His lordship asks, will you come out and look at this?”

It had stopped snowing. A moon shone from a sky full of stars onto a landscape almost as beautiful. The bishop and the rest of his entourage stood with Mansur in a group at the beginning of a narrow, humped stone bridge, its parapets perfectly outlined in snow. Loud water hidden by the drop on the left suggested a weir or millrace. To the right was the gleam of a smooth river. Trees stood like white sentinels.

As Adelia came up, Rowley pointed behind her. She looked back and saw some humped cottages. “That’s the village of Wolvercote,” he said. He turned her so that she was now facing across the bridge to where the stars were blanked out by a complexity of roofs. “Godstow Abbey.” There was a suggestion of light coming from somewhere among its buildings, though any windows on this side were dark.

But it was what was in the middle of the bridge that she must look at. The first thing she saw was a saddled horse, not moving, head and reins drooping downward, one leg bent up. The groom, Walt, stood at its head, patting its neck. His voice came shrill and querulous through the stillness. “Who’da done this? He’s a good un, this un, who’da done it?” He was more concerned for the horse than for the dead man sprawled facedown in the snow beside it.

“Robbery and murder on the King’s Highway,” Rowley said quietly, his breath wreathing like smoke. “Plain coincidence and nothing to do with our purpose, but I suppose you’d better look, bodies being your business. Just be quick about it, that’s all.”

He’d kept everyone else back like she’d taught him; only the groom’s footprints and his own showed going to the bridge in the snow, and only his returned. “I had to make sure the fellow was dead,” he said. “Take Mansur with you for the look of it.” He raised his voice. “The lord Mansur can read traces left on the ground. He speaks little English, so Mistress Adelia will interpret for him.”

Adelia stayed where she was for a moment, Mansur beside her. “What time is it, do you know?” she asked in Arabic.

“Listen.”

She unbound her head from its muffler. From the other side of the bridge, solitary, faraway, but clear over the rush of noisy water, came a sweet female voice raised in a monotone. It paused and was answered by the disciplined response of other voices.

She was hearing a chime of the liturgical clock, an antiphon. The nuns of Godstow had roused from their beds and were chanting Vigils.