Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

Behind her, Schwyz’s soothing went on, but the wail of the abbot rose high above it. “Why Saint Albans? Why not me? ”

With Mansur carrying the cradle, they collected a staggering, singing Gyltha and walked back to the guesthouse through the welcome cold of the night.

Adelia was too deep in shock to be angry, though she knew she would be; after all, she had more regard for herself than women who, miserably, expected assault as the price for being women. But even while her body was shaking, her mind was trying to fathom the reason for what had happened. “I don’t understand,” she said, wailing. “I thought he was a different sort of enemy.”

“Allah punish him, but he would not have hurt you, I think,” Mansur said.

“What are you talking about? He did hurt me. He tried to rape me.”

“He is incapable, I think,” Mansur said. His own condition had made a judge of such things; he found the sexuality of so-called normal men interesting. Though castrated, unable to have children, he himself could still have sex with a woman, and there was lofty pity in his voice for one who could not.

“He seemed capable enough to me.” Sobbing, Adelia stopped and scooped up snow to rub over her face. “Why are you so tolerant?”

“He wants, but he cannot have. I think so. He is a talker, not a doer.”

Was that it? Inadequacy? Among all the filth, there had been a despairing appeal for love, sex, something.

Rowley had said of him, “Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope.”

And with all the cleverness, this friend of popes must, when drunk, plead for a despised woman’s regard like a child for somebody else’s toy.

Because she despised him ?

And I do, she thought. If there was vulnerability, it made the abbot the more loathsome to her. Adelia preferred her enemies straightforwardly and wholeheartedly without humanity.

“I hate him,” she said-and now she was angry. “Mansur, I’m going to bring that man down.”

The Arab bent his head. “Let us pray that Allah wills it.”

“He’d better.”

Fury was cleansing to the mind. Nevertheless, as Mansur persuaded Gyltha to stop kissing him and go to sleep, Adelia washed herself all over in a bowl of icy water from the ewer. And felt better.

“I’ll bring him down,” she said again, “somehow.”

For a minute, which was all that could be borne of the cold, she opened one of the shutters to look out on the geometric shadows that the pitches of the abbey’s roofs were throwing onto the stretch of snow beyond its walls.

A blacker runnel scarred the moonlit whiteness where a new track had been dug to the river. They were linked now, the abbey and the Thames. For the first time, there was an escape route from this seething, overfilled cauldron of humanity where paragons and monsters fought the ultimate, yet never-ending, battle in suffocating collision.

At least one soul had taken it. Somewhere in that metallic wilderness, Dakers was risking her life not, Adelia knew, in order to disappear from her captors but to reach the thing she loved, though it was dead.

W hen, early next morning, Adelia opened the shutters on Saint Stephen’s Day, it was to find that something had happened to the view from the guesthouse. Yes, of course, a new path was leading down to the bank-they’d cut rough steps in it-but it was more than that; the sense of isolation was gone, and expectation had taken its place.

It was difficult to see why; dawn was blessing the deserted countryside with its usual ephemeral touch of apricot. The snow was as solid as it had been and contained no human footprints as far as the eye stretched.

Yet the white forest across the river was, somehow, less rigid…

“They’re here.”

Mansur joined her at the window. “I see nothing.”

“I thought I saw something in those trees.”

They stood looking. Adelia’s excitement trickled away; the expectation was in her, not in the view.

“Wolves, most like,” said Gyltha, who was skulking at the rear of the room, avoiding the light. “I heard them last night, horrid close they was.”

“Was that when you were vomiting into the chamber pot?” Adelia asked interestedly.

Gyltha ignored her. “Right up to the walls, they were. I reckon they found young Talbot’s horse as was left in the woods.”

Adelia hadn’t heard them-it had been bears that prowled her sleep. But Gyltha was probably right; it would be wolves among the trees-less frightening than those inside the walls.

Yet the leap of hope that Rowley was alive and had brought the king and his men to them had been so volcanic that she couldn’t relinquish it altogether. “There could be an army hiding out there,” she said. “It wouldn’t attack without knowing the strength of the force inside the abbey-the sisters might get hurt. He’d wait, Henry would wait.”

“What for?” Mansur asked.

“Yes what for?” Gyltha was being determinedly talkative to show that she wasn’t suffering. “He wouldn’t need an army to take this place-me and little Allie could storm it by ourselves. And how’d the king get here? No, old Wolf knows he’s safe til the snow melts. He ain’t even posted lookouts.”

“He has now,” Mansur said.

Adelia leaned out. Gyltha joined her. Immediately below, a man in Wolvercote scarlet and black was patrolling the walkway running along the hopelessly inadequate castellations of the convent wall, his morning shadow falling rhythmically on the merlons as he passed and disappearing at each crenel. He had a pike in one hand and a rattle in the other.

“What’s he guarding us from?” Gyltha asked. “Magpies? There ain’t no army out there. Nobody don’t fight in winter.”

“Henry does,” Adelia said. She was hearing Rowley’s voice, vibrating from the near-incredulous pleasure with which he’d spoken of his king’s exploits, recounting the tale of the young Plantagenet when, fighting for his mother’s right to the throne of England against his uncle Stephen, he’d crossed the Channel with a small army in a bitter Christmas gale, catching his enemies hibernating-and beating them.

Until now, Wolvercote had been relying on an English winter to keep his enemy as powerless to move as he was. But whether it was because the umbilical path through the snow now connected the convent to the outside world, or whether there was something in the air today, Saint Stephen’s day, he had set a guard…

“He’s afraid.” Adelia’s own voice vibrated. “He thinks Henry’s coming. And he could, Mansur, the king could -his men could skate upriver and get here.” She had another thought: “I suppose Wolvercote could even skate his men down to Oxford and join the other rebels. Why hasn’t he?”

“The man Schwyz thought of it. He is the better tactician,” Mansur said. “He asked Fitchet if it could be done. But further down, the Thames is deeper and has more tributaries, its ice does not hold and cannot be risked. Nobody can go or come that way.” Mansur spread his hands in apology to Adelia for disappointing her. “Local knowledge. No one moves until the snow melts.”

“And close them bloody shutters,” Gyltha said. “You want this baby to freeze?” Suddenly gentle, she added, “Nobody in the outside world don’t know we’re here, my duck.”

“The woman is right,” Mansur said.

They’ve lost hope, she thought. They’ve given Rowley up for dead at last. Godstow festered like an unsuspected bubo in the world’s white flesh, waiting to spread its poison. Only the birds overhead could know that it flew the pennant of a rebel queen-and birds weren’t likely to tell anybody.