Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

“What nonsense is this?” Father Paton disapproved of Jacques only slightly less than he did of Adelia.

“Jacques has been delivering two invitations that I’ve written, Father,” she told him. “We are going to eavesdrop; we are going to prove who contrived the death of Talbot of Kidlington.”

“I will have nothing to do with all your supposed killings. You expect me to eavesdrop? Preposterous, I refuse.”

“What supposed killings?” Jacques asked, puzzled.

“We shall be there,” Adelia told the priest. She cut off his protests. “Yes, you shall. We need an independent witness. God in Heaven, Father, a young man was put to death.”

A rough figure with an even rougher voice had come up to them. “Get inside, you lot, and quick about it.” Cross had his arms held wide to scoop the three of them toward the steps.

Glad to go, Father Paton skated off.

“ Can he help us with Bertha’s death?” Jacques asked.

“I’m not telling you again,” Cross said. “The chief says inside, so get bloody inside.”

Jacques obeyed. Adelia lingered.

“Come on, now, missis. ’S getting chilly.” The mercenary took her arm, not unkindly. “See, you’re shaking.”

“I don’t want to go in,” she said. The convent walls would imprison her and the killer together again; she was being dragged back into a cage that held a monster with blood on its fangs.

“You ain’t staying here all night.” As he pulled her over the ice, Cross shouted over his shoulder at the wren hunters in the trees. “Time to go in, lads.”

When they reached the steps, he had to haul Adelia up them like an executioner assisting a prisoner to the gallows.

Behind them, a crowd of men emerged from the trees of the far bank, shouting in triumph over a small cage twisted from withies in which fluttered a frightened wren. They were hooded, covered in snow, their black faces rendering them unrecognizable.

And if, whooping and capering with the rest, there was one more figure going in through the convent gates than had left them, nobody noticed it.

The convent carpenter had laid boards across the end rafters of the church’s Saint Mary side chapel in order to facilitate the removal and replacement of struts that showed signs of rotting, creating a temporary and partial little loft in which the two people now hiding in it could listen but not see. Adelia and Father Paton were, quite literally, eavesdroppers.

It had taken considerable urging to get the priest to accompany her into the rafters. He’d protested at the subterfuge, the risk, the indignity.

Adelia hadn’t liked it, either. This wasn’t her way of doing things, it was arbitrary, unscientific. Worse, the fear she felt at being once more in the abbey sapped her energy, leaving her with a deadening feeling of futility.

But coming in through the chapel’s door, a draft had wavered the candles burning on the Virgin’s altar, one of them lit by Emma for Talbot of Kidlington, and so she had bullied, shamed, and cajoled. “We have a duty to the dead, Father.” It was the bedrock of her faith, as fundamental to her as the Athanasian Creed to Western liturgy, and perhaps the priest had recognized its virtue, for he had stopped arguing and climbed the ladder Jacques set for them.

Now Vespers had chimed, the faint chanting from the cloisters had stopped. The church was empty-ever since the mercenaries had proved troublesome, the nuns had transferred the vigil for their dead to their own chapel.

Somewhere a dog barked. Fitchet’s mongrel, probably-a bristled terror at whose every approach Ward, not renowned for his courage, lay down and rolled over.

They were too far back in the loft to see anything below. Only a glow from the altar candles in the church proper reached them so that they could, at least, make out the wagon roof above them. It gave Adelia the impression that she and the priest were lying on the thwarts of an upended boat. Uncomfortably.

Fierce little beads that were the eyes of the bats hanging from the lathes overhead glared down at her.

A scamper nearby caused Father Paton to squeak. “I abhor rats.”

“Be quiet,” she told him.

“This is foolishness.”

Perhaps it was, but they couldn’t alter it now-Jacques had taken the ladder away, replacing it in the bell tower next door from whence it had come, perching himself in the shadows at the tower’s top.

A latch clicked. The unoiled hinges of the chapel’s side door protested with a screech. Somebody hissed at the noise. The door closed. Silence.

Warin. It would be the lawyer; Wolvercote wouldn’t creep as this one crept.

Adelia felt a curious despair. It was one thing to theorize about a man’s guilt, another to have it confirmed. Somewhere below her stood a creature who’d betrayed the only relative he had, a boy in his care, a boy who’d trusted him and had been sent to his death.

A rasp of hinges again, this time accompanied by the stamp of boots. There was a vibration of energy.

“Did you send me this?” Wolvercote’s voice. Furious. If Master Warin protested, the listeners did not hear him because Wolvercote continued without pause. “Yes you did, you whoreson, you puling pot of pus, you stinking spittle, you’ll not tax me for more, you crapulous bit of crud…”

The tirade, its wonderful alliteration unsuspected from such a source, was accompanied by slaps, presumably across Master Warin’s face, that resounded against the walls like whip cracks-each one making Father Paton jump so that Adelia, lying beside him in the rafters, flinched in unison.

The lawyer was keeping his head, though it had to be buzzing. “Look, look, my lord. In the name of Christ, look. ” The onslaught stopped.

He’s showing his letter.

Apart from giving the time and place of the suggested meeting, the message she’d written to each man had been short: We are discovered.

There was a long pause while Wolvercote-not a reading man-deciphered the note sent to Warin. The lawyer said quietly, “It’s a trap. Somebody’s here.”

There were hurried, soft footfalls as Warin searched, the opening of cupboards-a thump of hassocks falling to the floor as they were dislodged. “Somebody’s here. ”

“ Who’s here? What trap?” Wolvercote was staying where he was, shouting after Warin as the little man went into the body of the church to search that, too. “Didn’t you send me this?”

“What’s up there?” Master Warin had come back. “We should look up there.”

He’s looking upward. The impression that the man’s eyes could see through the boards tensed Adelia’s muscles. Father Paton didn’t move.

“Nobody’s up there. How could anybody get up there? What trap?”

“My lord, somebody knows.” Master Warin had calmed himself a little. “My lord, you shouldn’t have hanged the knaves. It looked badly. I’d promised them money to leave the country.”

So you supplied the killers.

“Of course I hanged the dogs.” Wolvercote was still shouting. “Who knew if they would keep their mouths shut. God curse you, Warin, if this is a ploy for more payment…”

“It is not, my lord, though Sweet Mary knows it was a great service I rendered you…”

“Yes.” Wolvercote’s tone had become quieter, more considering. “I am beginning to wonder why.”

“I told you, my lord. I would not have you wronged by one of my own family; when I heard what the boy intended…”

“And no benefit to you? Then why in hell did you come here? What brought you galloping to the abbey to see if he was dead?”

They were moving off into the nave of the church, their voices trailing into unintelligible exchanges of animosity and complaint.