Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

The infirmaress had come into the church, Jacques with her. Exclamation and exhortation created a hubbub that had an echo, Sister Jennet’s crisp pipe-“Now, now, child, this will not do”-interspersed with the bellows of the father, who was becoming outraged and looking for someone to blame, while the mother’s anxiety made a softer counterpoint to them both.

Adelia touched Emma’s clawed hand, gently. The girl raised her head, but what she saw with those tormented eyes Adelia couldn’t tell. “Do you see what they’ve done? To him, to him ?”

The father and Sister Jennet were standing away now, openly quarreling. The mother had stopped attending to her daughter in order to join in.

“Control yourself, Master Bloat. Where else should we have lain a body but in a church?” Sister Jennet did not add that as far as Godstow and bodies were concerned, they were running out of space.

“Not where a man can fall over it; that’s not what we pay our tithes for.”

“That’s right, Father, that’s right…” This was Mistress Bloat. “We was just being shown round, wasn’t us? Our girl was showing us round.”

Emma’s eyes still stared into Adelia’s as if into the Pit. “Do you see, oh, God, do you see?”

“I see,” Adelia told her.

And she did, wondering how she could have been so blind not to see it before. So that was why Talbot of Kidlington had been murdered.

W here were you going to elope to ?”

“Wales.”

The girl sat on a stool in the corner of Adelia and Gyltha’s room. She’d torn the veil off her head, and long, white-blond hair swayed over her face as she rocked back and forth. Allie, upset by the manifestations of such grief, had begun to bawl and was being jiggled quiet again in her mother’s arms. Ward, also showing an unexpected commiseration, lay with his head on Emma’s boots.

She’d fought to be there, literally. When at last they’d been able to prise her away from the body, she’d stretched her arms toward Adelia, saying, “I’ll go with her, her. She understands, she knows. ”

“Dang sight more’n I do,” Master Bloat had said, and Adelia had rather sympathized with him-until, that is, he’d tried to drag his daughter off, putting a hand over her mouth so that her noise would attract no more attention than it had.

Emma had been his match, twisting and shrieking to beat him off. At last Sister Jennet had advised compliance. “Let her go with this lady for now. She has some medical knowledge and may be able to calm her.”

They could do nothing else, but from the looks Master and Mistress Bloat gave her as she helped their daughter toward the guesthouse, Adelia was aware that she’d added two more to her growing list of enemies.

She managed to persuade the girl to drink an infusion of lady’s slipper, and it calmed her enough that she could answer questions, though Gyltha, who was gently rubbing the back of Emma’s neck with rose oil, frowned at Adelia every time she asked one. A silent argument was going on between them.

Leave the poor soul alone, for pity’s sake.

I can’t.

She’s breaking her heart.

It’ll mend. Talbot’s won’t.

Gyltha might sorrow for the stricken one, but Adelia’s duty as she saw it was to Talbot of Kidlington, who had loved Emma Bloat and had ridden to the convent through snow to take her away and marry her, an elopement so financially disastrous to a third party-Adelia’s thoughts rested on the Lord of Wolvercote-that it had ordered his killing.

Master Hobnails and Master Clogs hadn’t been waiting on an isolated bridge on a snowy night for any old traveler to come along; common scoundrels though they undoubtedly were, they weren’t brainless. They knew, because somebody had told them, that at a certain hour a certain man would ride up to the convent gates… Kill him.

They had killed him, and then they’d fled over the bridge to the village-to be killed themselves.

By the very man who’d employed them in the first place?

Oh, yes, Wolvercote fitted that particular bill nicely.

Though perhaps not entirely. Adelia still puzzled over the lengths someone had gone to in order to make sure that the corpse was identified as Talbot’s. She supposed, if it was Wolvercote, he’d wanted Emma to know of her lover’s death as soon as possible, and that her hand-and her fortune-was now his again.

Yes, but presumably, when Talbot didn’t turn up, that way would have been made open. Why did the corpse have to be put under her nose, as it were, right away? And why in circumstances that pointed the accusing finger so directly at Wolvercote himself?

Do you see what they’ve done?

Who were the “they” that Emma thought had done it?

Adelia put Allie on the floor, gave her the teething ring that Mansur had carved for the child out of bone, and sat herself by Emma, smoothing back the long hair and mouthing “I have to” over her head at Gyltha.

The girl was almost apathetic with shock. “Let me stay here with you.” She said it over and over. “I don’t want to see them, any of them. I can’t. You’ve loved a man, you had his child. You understand. They don’t.”

“’Course you can stay,” Gyltha told her.

“My love is dead.”

So is mine, Adelia thought. The girl’s grief was her own. She forced it away. There’d been murder done, and death was her business. “You were going to Wales?” she asked, “In winter ?”

“We’d had to wait, you see. Until he was twenty-one. To get his inheritance.” The sentences came in pieces with an abstracted dullness.

To Talbot of Kidlington, That the Lord and His angels bless you on this Day that Enters you into Man’s estate.

And on that day Talbot of Kidlington had set out to carry off Emma Bloat with, if Adelia remembered aright, the two silver marks that had been enclosed in Master Warin’s letter.

“His inheritance was two silver marks?” Then she recalled that Emma didn’t know about the marks because she didn’t know about the letter.

The girl barely noticed the interjection. “The land in Wales. His mother left it to him, Felin Fach…” She said the name softly, as if it had been spoken often, a sweet thing held out to her in her lover’s voice. “‘Felin Fach,’ he used to say. ‘The vale of the Aêron, where salmon leap up to meet the rod and the very earth yields gold.’”

“Gold?” Adelia looked a question at Gyltha. Is there gold in Wales?

Gyltha shrugged.

“He was going to take possession as soon as he gained his majority. It was part of his inheritance, you see. We were going there. Father Gwilym was waiting to marry us. ‘Funny little man, not a word of English…’ ” She was quoting again, almost smiling. “‘Yet in Welsh he can tie as tight a marriage knot as any priest in the Vatican.’”

This was dreadful; Gyltha was wiping her eyes. Adelia, too, was sorry, so sorry. To watch suffering like this was to be in pain oneself, but she had to have answers.

“Emma, who knew you were going to elope?”

“Nobody.” Now she did actually smile. “‘No cloak, or they’ll guess.

I’ll have one for you. Fitchet will open the gate…’”

“Fitchet?”

“Well, of course Fitchet knew about us; Talbot paid him.”

Apparently, the gatekeeper counted as nobody in Emma’s reckoning.

The girl’s face withered. “But he didn’t come. I waited in the gatehouse…I waited…I thought…I thought…oh, Sweet Jesus, show mercy to me, I blamed him…” She began clawing the air. “Why did they kill him? Couldn’t they just take his purse? Why kill him?”