Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

Vigils over, the convent was silent again. From deeper in among the trees of the forest came Walt’s prayer, “And the Lord have mercy on thy poor soul, if thee have one.”

A long scream like a whistle, a heavy crash. Silence.

Walt emerged, simultaneously wiping his dagger on his cloak with one hand and his eyes with the other. “Goddamn, I hates a’doing that.”

The bishop patted him on the shoulder and sent him to join the others on the far side of the bridge. To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “They knew he was coming, then?”

“Yes. They were waiting for him.” Even the most desperate robber didn’t loiter in the hope of a passerby in the early hours of a freezing night.

They must have thought themselves lucky that the blizzard had passed, she thought, not knowing they were imprinting their guilt in the resultant snow for Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, medica of the renowned School of Medicine in Salerno, expert on death and the causes of death, to happen along and decipher it.

For which they were going to be sorry.

It had been a cold wait; they’d stamped their feet to keep warm. In her mind, Adelia waited with them, nibbling phantom cheese. Perhaps they had listened to the sound of Compline being sung before the nuns retired to bed for the three hours until Vigils. Apart from that it would have been quiet except for an owl or two, perhaps, and the shriek of a vixen.

Here he comes, the rider. Up the road that leads from the river to the convent, his horse’s hooves muffled by the earlier snow but still audible in the silence.

He’s nearing the gates, slowing-does he mean to go in? But Villain Number One has stepped out in front of him, the crossbow cocked and straining. Does the rider see him? Shout out? Recognize the man? Probably not; the shadows are dark here. Anyway, the bolt has been loosed and is already deep in his chest.

The horse rears, sending its rider backward and tumbling, breaking the bolt’s flights as he falls. Villain Number Two snatches at the reins, leads the terrified horse to the trees, and tethers it there.

“He’s on the ground and dying-a crossbow quarrel is nearly always fatal wherever it hits,” Adelia said, “but they made sure. One or other of them-whoever he was has big hands-throttled him as he lay on the ground.”

“God have mercy,” the bishop said.

“Yes, but here’s the interesting thing,” Adelia told him, as if everything else had been commonplace. “ Now they drag him to the center of the bridge. See? The toes of his boots make runnels in the snow. They throw his cap down beside him-dear Lord , they’re stupid. Did they think a man fallen from his mount looks so tidy? Legs together? Skirts down? You saw that, didn’t you? And then, then , they fetch his horse to the bridge and slice its leg.”

“They do not take him into the trees,” Mansur pointed out. “Nor the horse. Neither would have been found if they’d done that, not until the spring, and by then, no one could see what had happened to them. But no, they drag him to where the first person across the bridge in the morning will see him and raise the hue and cry.”

“Not giving the killers as much time to get away as they might have.” The bishop was reflective. “I see. That’s…eccentric.”

“ This is what’s eccentric,” Adelia said. They’d come up to the body again. At the bottom of the bridge where the others were gathered, somebody had made a makeshift brazier and lit a fire. Faces, ghastly in the reflection of the flames, turned hopefully in their direction. “You goin’ to be much longer?” Gyltha shouted. “Little un’s due a feed, and we’m dyin’ of frostbite.”

Adelia ignored her. She still didn’t feel the cold. “Two men,” she said, “and they are poor, judging from their footwear. Two men kill our rider. Granted, they take the money from his purse, but they leave the purse, a good one that has his family crest on it. They leave his boots, his cloak, the silver buckle, his fine horse. What thief does that?”

“Perhaps they were disturbed,” Rowley said.

“Who disturbs them? Not us. They are long gone before we come up. They had time to strip this poor soul of everything he…had. They do not. Why, Rowley?”

The bishop thought it through. “They want him found.”

Adelia nodded. “It is vital to them.”

“They want him to be identified.”

Adelia’s exhaled breath was a stream of satisfaction. “Exactly. It must be known who he is and that he is dead.”

“I see.” Rowley considered. “Hence the suggestion that we hide his body. I don’t like it, though.”

“But that will bring them back, Rowley,” Adelia said, and for the first time she touched him, a tug on his sleeve. “They’ve taken pains to have this poor young man’s death declared to the world. They’ll come back to find out why it isn’t. We can be waiting for them.”

Mansur nodded. “Some fiend intends to profit by this killing, Allah ruin him.”

Adelia jiggled the bishop’s sleeve again. “But not if the boy seems merely to have gone away, just disappeared.”

Rowley was doubtful. “There’ll be someone at home, worrying for him.”

“If so, they’ll want his murderers found.”

“He ought to be buried with decency.”

“Not yet.”

Pulling his arm from her grasp, the bishop went away from her. Adelia watched him go to the parapet of the bridge and lean over it, looking at the roaring water that showed white in the moonlight.

He hates it when I do this, she thought. He was prepared to love the woman but not the doctor. Yet it was the doctor he invited along, and he must bear the consequences. I have a duty to that dead boy, and I will not abandon it.

Now she was cold.

“Very well.” He turned round. “You may be fortunate in that Godstow possesses an icehouse. Famous for it.”

While the body was being wrapped in its cloak and its possessions collected, Adelia went to the fire to feed her baby.

The Bishop of Saint Albans gathered his men round him to tell them what Dr. Mansur had discovered from reading the signs in the snow.

“With the mercy of God, we may hope to catch these killers. Until then, not one of you-I say again, nobody -is to mention what we have seen this night. We shall keep this body reverently, but secretly, hidden in order to find out who comes back for it-and may God have mercy on their souls, for we shall not.”

It was well done. Rowley had fought in Outremer on Crusade and found that men responded better for knowing what their commander was about than those merely given reasonless commands.

He drew an assenting growl from the circle about him, the messenger’s particularly fervent-he and the others spent much of their lives on the road, and they saw the rider on the bridge as any one of themselves fallen to the predators infesting the highways. As Good Samaritans, they had been too late to save the traveler’s life, but they could at least bring his killers to justice.

Only Father Paton’s frown suggested that he was assessing how much the corpse was going to cost the ecclesiastical purse.

Baring their heads, the men took the body up and put it in the cart. With everybody walking beside it, leading their horses, they crossed the bridge to Godstow nunnery.

G odstow Abbey with its surrounding grounds and fields was actually a large island formed by curves of the Thames’s upper reaches and tributaries. Although the porter who unbarred its gates to the travelers was a man, as were the groom and ostler who saw to their horses, it was an island ruled by women.

If asked, its twenty-four nuns and their female pensioners would have insisted that it was the Lord God who had called them to abandon the world, but their air of contentment suggested that the Lord’s wish had coincided exactly with their own. Some were widows with money who’d heard God’s call at their husband’s graveside and hurried to answer it at Godstow before they could be married off again. Some were maidens who, glimpsing the husbands selected for them, had been overwhelmed by a sudden vocation for chastity and had taken their dowries with them into the convent instead. Here they could administer a sizable, growing fiefdom efficiently and with a liberal hand-and they could do it without male interference.