Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

They sat a while longer, listening. The singer had changed his tune and his theme. “I would hold thee naked in my arms at eve, that we might be in ecstasy, my head against thy breast…”

“That, too, is love of a sort, nevertheless,” Mother Edyve said, “and perhaps all one to our Great Parent, who made our bodies as they are.”

Adelia smiled at her, thinking of being in bed with Rowley. “I have been convinced that it is.”

“So have I, which speaks well for the men we have loved.” There was a reflective sigh. “But don’t tell Father Egbert.”

The abbess got up with difficulty and tested her legs.

Warmed, Adelia went to help her settle her cloak. “Mother,” she said on impulse, “I am afraid for Dame Dakers’s safety.”

A heavily veined little hand flapped her away; Mother Edyve had become impatient to go. “You are a busy soul, child, and I am grateful for it, but you may leave Dakers’s safety to me.”

As she hobbled out, she said something else, but the words were indistinct, something like, “After all, I have the keys to the lockup.”

By the end of that day, Adelia had changed. Perhaps it was anger at Emma Bloat’s rape. Perhaps it was anger at the attempt on Dakers’s life. Perhaps it was the courage inspired by Mother Edyve.

Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t cower in the guesthouse anymore while murderers and abductors went unchecked.

In essence, the killer of Rosamund and Bertha had made a contract with her: Leave me alone and your child is safe.

A shameful contract. Nevertheless, she would have abided by it, taking it as a given that he would not kill again.

But he’d tossed a burning rag through an aperture as if the living woman inside was rubbish.

I can’t allow that, she told him.

She was afraid, very afraid indeed; her baby would have to be protected as no child ever had been, but she, Adelia, could not live, her daughter could not live, at the cost of other people’s deaths.

“Where you going?” Gyltha called after her.

“I’m going to ask questions.”

She found Jacques in the cloister, being taught how to play the viol by one of the troubadours. The courtiers were colonizing the place. And the nuns, she thought, are now too intimidated by everything that has happened to stop them.

She dragged the unwilling messenger away toward the almonry and sat him and herself down on a mounting block.

“Yes, mistress?”

“I want you to help me find out who ordered the killing of Talbot of Kidlington.”

He was set aback. “I don’t know as I’m up to that, mistress.”

She ignored him and recounted the list of those she suspected: “Wolvercote, Master Warin, the gatekeeper, and the Bloats.” She went into detail.

He rubbed his chin; it was closely shaved now, like all the young men’s at Eleanor’s court.

“I can tell you one thing, if it helps,” he said. “Lawyer Warin made a to-do when he was introduced to my lord Wolvercote in church. ‘So honored to make your acquaintance, my lord. We have not met, but I have long wished to know …’ He made a point of it-I was there and heard him. If he mentioned that they had not encountered each other before, he must have said it three or four times.”

“How did Wolvercote greet Master Warin?”

“Like he treats everybody, as if he’d been squirted out of a backside.” He grimaced, afraid of having offended her. “Sorry, mistress.”

“But you believe Warin was insisting they hadn’t met before when, really, they had?”

Jacques thought about it. “Yes, I do.”

Adelia was shivering. Ward had crept under her skirts and was pressing against her knees for warmth. A gargoyle on the gutter of the abbess’s house opposite gaped at her, its chin bearded with icicles.

I am watching you.

She said, “Emma thought kindly of Master Warin, which means that Talbot did, too, which also means the boy trusted him…”

“And confided his intention to elope?” The messenger was becoming interested.

“I know he did,” she said. “Emma told me so. The boy told Warin he was choosing his birthday as the day for the elopement so that he could take possession of his inheritance…”

“Which, unbeknownst, Master Warin had squandered…” This was exciting.

Adelia nodded. “Which, indeed, Master Warin may have squandered, thereby necessitating his young cousin’s removal…”

“…and it dawns on Master Warin that he has an ally in Lord Wolvercote. Old Wolfie will be deprived of a bride and a fortune if the elopement goes ahead.”

“Yes. So he approaches Lord Wolvercote and suggests Talbot should die.”

They sat back to think it through.

“Why was it so urgent that Talbot’s body be identified right away?” Adelia wondered.

“That’s easy, mistress. Lawyer Warin may be pressed for money-he looks a man who likes to live well. If he’s Talbot’s heir, it would take too long to prove to a coroner that the estate of the anonymous corpse was his. That takes a long time. Courts are slow. His creditors would come in before he inherited.”

“And it would suit Wolvercote for Emma to realize that her lover was dead. Yes, it’s all of a piece,” she said. “It was Wolvercote who provided the killers. Warin probably didn’t know any.”

“And got rid of them once they’d done the deed. It could be so, mistress.”

Talking it over had hardened the case for Adelia, turning theory to reality. Two men had conspired to blot out a young life. Wickedness was discussed in lawyers’ offices as business, considered in manor houses over a flagon of wine; men were instructed in it. Normality, goodness were commodities to be traded for greed. Innocence was helpless against it. She was helpless against it. It gibbered at her from the rooftops.

“How to prove it, though?” Jacques asked.

“Plotters distrust one another,” she said. “I think it can be done, but I shall need you to help me.”

She let him go then, and hurried back to the guesthouse, unable to shake off her fear for Allie.

“Right as a shilling,” Gyltha said. “Look at her.”

But Adelia knew that Gyltha, too, was afraid, because she’d told Mansur to move in with them, day and night.

“Anyone as doesn’t like it can go and…well, you know what,” she said. “So you do what you got to do. Mansur’s on guard.”

But so was the killer…

Now she had to go and see Father Paton.

This time she did it carefully, waiting until night, watching for watchers, slipping from shadow to shadow until she was protected by the narrow walk that led to the warming room stairs.

Sister Lancelyne was at Vespers, and the little priest was alone, poring over the cartulary by candlelight, none too pleased to be interrupted.

Adelia told him everything, everything , beginning with finding Talbot’s body on the bridge-the little priest might have missed it while he’d been keeping warm in the cart-proceeding to the happenings at Wormhold, to the return to Godstow and the death of Bertha, her suspicions of who did what, the threat to Allie, the threat to Dame Dakers.

He didn’t want to hear it. He kept shifting and glancing longingly at the documents open in front of him. This was a tale reeking of the cardinal sins, and Father Paton preferred humanity in the abstract. “Are you certain?” he kept asking. “Surely not. How dare you reckon such things?”

Adelia persisted, skewering him with logic like a pin through a butterfly. She didn’t like him much; he didn’t like her at all, but he was separated from the battle in which she was engaged, and his mind was like one of his own ledgers; she needed it as a register.