Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

“You must keep it all very, very secret,” she told him. “Mention it to nobody except the king.” This bloodless little man had to be the repository of her knowledge so that, in the event of her death, he could pass it on to Henry Plantagenet. “When the king comes, he will know what to do.”

“But I do not.”

“Yes, you do.” And she told him what it was that he must look for.

“This is impudence.” He was shocked. “In any case, I doubt that, even if it is extant, it will prove your case.”

Adelia doubted it, too, but it was all she had in her armory. She attempted an encouragement that she didn’t feel. “The king will come,” she said, “and he will prevail in the end.” That was her only certainty. Eleanor might be extraordinary, but she had pitted herself against one who straddled his kingdom like a colossus; she could not win.

There Father Paton agreed with her. “Yes, yes,” he said, “a queen is only a woman, unable to fight any cause successfully, let alone her own. All she may expect is God’s punishment for rebelling against her rightful lord.”

He turned on Adelia. “You, too, mistress, are a mere woman, sinful, impertinent, and right or wrong, you should not be questioning your betters.”

She held her temper and instead dangled a carrot. “When the king does come,” she said, “he’ll want to know who murdered Rosamund. There will be advancement for the man that can tell him who it was.”

She watched the priest’s mouth purse as he entered possible promotion to an abbacy, even a bishopric, into a mental balance sheet against the risk and lèse-majesté of what he was being asked to do.

“I suppose I shall be serving God, who is all truth,” he said slowly.

“You will,” she said, and left him to get on with it.

And then it was Christmas.

The church was so packed with bodies for Angel Mass that it was actually hot, and the smell of humanity threatened to overwhelm the fresh, bitter scent of holly and ivy garlands.

Adelia almost sweltered in her beaver cloak. She kept it on because, underneath, she was wearing the bliaut that Eleanor’s seamstresses had finished just in time and knew that she looked so nice in it, with all the other trimmings the queen had given her, that she felt she would attract attention.

“You show yourself,” Gyltha had protested. “You don’t look half bad.” Which, from her, was praise.

But the instinct to keep out of the killer’s eye was still strong. Perhaps she would take off her cloak at the coming feast; perhaps she wouldn’t.

The choir stalls, once more reserved for the nuns, provided a black-and-white edging to the embroidered, bedecked altar with its blaze of candles and the robes of the abbot and two priests as they moved through the litany like glowing chess pieces.

The magic was infallible.

The queue for Communion included murderous men, hostile factions, every gamut of human weakness and sorrow, yet, as it moved quietly forward, it was gripped by the same awe. At the rail, the miller knelt beside one of the men who had belabored him. Adelia received the host from the Abbot of Eynsham, whose hands rested for a second in blessing on the head of Baby Allie. The cup passed from a Wolvercote mercenary to one of Schwyz’s before each lumbered back to his place, chewing and exalted.

There was common and growing breathlessness as Mary labored in her stable a few yards away. The running footfalls of the shepherds came nearer and nearer. Angels chanted above the starlit, snow-stacked church roof.

When the abbot, raising his arms, announced a deep-throated “The Child is born,” his exhortation to go in peace was lost in a great shout of congratulation, several of the women yelling advice on breast-feeding to the invisible but present Mary and prompting her to “make sure and wrap that baby up warm now.”

Bethlehem was here. It was now.

As Adelia filed into the great barn, Jacques pushed through the crowd to touch her shoulder. “The queen’s greeting, mistress, and she will be disappointed if you are not wearing the gifts she gave you.”

Reluctantly, Adelia took off her cloak with its hood, revealing the bliaut and the barbette, and felt naked. Walt, who was beside her, looked at her and stared. “Wondered who this stranger was,” he said. She supposed that, too, was a compliment. And indeed, she received a lot of surprised looks-most of them friendly. For this was another gift Eleanor had, unconsciously, given her; by showing her favor, the queen had cleansed her of the taint of witchcraft.

Though Eleanor and her court had made plans for its entertainments, the feast in the barn was expropriated by the English.

Expropriated? It was run away with.

Charming Aquitanian carols were drowned in roaring wassails as the flaming Yule log, dragged in on the end of a harness by an ox, was set on a hearth in the middle of the great square formed by the tables in the barn. A minstrel in the gallery-actually, the hayloft-tried singing to the diners, but since, it turned out, all the convent’s people and most of the village had been invited and were making too much noise to hear him, he gave up and descended to eat with the rest.

It was a Viking meal. Meat and more meat. The icehouse had yielded its best. Eleanor’s cook had, literally, battled for his art in the kitchen, but his winter sallats and frumenty, his pretty painted pastry castles and delicate flower-water jellies had been so overwhelmed and dripped on by lard and blood-gravy that he’d been taken poorly and now sat staring into space as his apprentice popped comforting little squares of roast pork into his mouth.

There were no courses, either. The convent servants had coped for too long with Godstow’s overflowing and demanding guests, and the advent of Christmas had worked them even harder. They’d spent the last few days in the scorching heat of cooking fires and in decorating the barn until it resembled a glade in a forest; they weren’t bloody going to miss the feast for which they’d sweated by running back and forth to the kitchens. Everything they’d cooked-savory, sweet, sauced, plain, breads and pudding-was dumped on the tables in one glorious heap while they clambered onto the benches nearest the barn doors to enjoy it.

This was a good thing; there was so much carving to be done at once, so much handing of dishes up and down the tables, so many shouts back and forth for “some of that stuffing for my lady,” “a slice off the gander, if you please,” “pass up the turnip mash, there” that a camaraderie of gustation grew between high and low, though it did not extend to the dogs waiting under the tables for scraps and squabbling when one fell their way.

Ward kept close to Adelia’s knees, where he was fed royally-his mistress was a small eater and, in order not to offend Mansur, who was sitting beside her and kept heaping her platter, she secretly slipped hunks of meat to her dog.

Eleanor, Adelia saw, was taking it all well. With good humor, the queen had put on the monstrous crown of ivy and bay leaves presented to her by the smith’s wife, thereby ruining her own simple headdress and adding to the growing paganism of the night by her sudden resemblance to an earth goddess.

Apart from the royal cook, the only person to take no part in the jollity was Emma, a glacial, unmoving figure sitting next to her husband, who ignored her. Adelia tried to catch her eye, and then didn’t; the girl looked at nothing.

How were Master and Mistress Bloat going to deal with the situation? Adelia wondered. Were they condemning the abduction of their daughter?

No, they’d decided to overlook it. They’d placed themselves on the inner side of one of the tables opposite the abductor, though Wolvercote was rebuffing most of their attempts to engage him in conversation.