Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

After a long time, they came back, only footsteps giving an indication of their return. The door scraped open. Boots stamped through it as loudly as they had come.

Father Paton shifted, but Adelia clamped his arm. Wait. They won’t want to be seen together. Wolvercote has left first.

Silence again. A quiet little man, the lawyer.

Now he was going. She waited until she heard the fall of the latch, then wriggled forward to peer over the boards.

The chapel was empty.

“Respectable men, a baron of the realm, ogres, ogres.” Father Paton’s horror was tinged with excitement. “The sheriff shall be told, I must write it down, yes, write it down. I am witness to conspiracy and murder. The sheriff will need a full affidavit. I am an important deponent, yes, I would not have believed…a baron of the realm.”

He could hardly wait for Jacques to bring the ladder. Even as he descended it, he was questioning the messenger on what had been said in the church.

For a moment, Adelia lay where she was, immobile. It didn’t matter what else had been said; two murderers condemned themselves out of their own mouths, as careless of the life they had conspired to take as of a piece of grass.

Oh, Emma.

She thought of the bolt buried in the young man’s chest, stopping that most wonderful organ, the heart, from beating, the indifference of the bowman who’d loosed it into the infinite complexity of vein and muscle, as indifferent as the cousin who had ordered it to be loosed, as the lord who’d paid him to do it.

Emma, Emma.

Father Paton scuttled back to the warming room-he wanted to write out his deposition right away.

There was a bright, cold moon, no necessity for a lantern. As Jacques escorted her home, he told her what he’d managed to hear in the church. Mostly it had been repetition of the exchanges in the chapel. “By the time they left,” he said, “they were deciding it was a trick played on them. Lord Wolvercote did, anyway, he suspects his mercenaries. Lawyer Warin was still atremble, I’ll wager he leaves the country if he can.”

They said good-bye at the foot of the guesthouse steps.

Unbelievably tired, Adelia dragged herself up, taking the last rise gingerly as she always did, now with the memory of an event that hadn’t happened but in which, constantly, she watched a cradle tumble over the edge.

She stopped. The door was slightly open, and it was dark inside. Even if her little household had gone to sleep, a taper was always left burning for her-and the door was never left open.

She was reassured by Ward coming to greet her, the energetic wag of his tail releasing more odor than usual. She went in.

The door was shut behind her. An arm encircled her chest, a hand clamped itself across her mouth. “Quietly now,” somebody whispered. “Guess who.”

She didn’t need to guess. Frantically, she wriggled around in the imprisoning arms until she faced the man, the only man.

“You bastard ,” she said.

“True, to an extent,” he said, picking her up. He chucked her onto the nearest bed and planted himself on top of her. “Ma and pa married eventually, I remember exactly, I was there.”

There wasn’t time to laugh-though, with his mouth clamped onto hers, she did.

Not dead-deliciously living, the smell of him so right, he was rightness, everything was right now that he was here. He moved her to the very soul and very, very much to her innards, which turned liquid at his touch. She’d been parched for too long.

Their bodies pumping like huge wings took them higher and higher on a flight into cataclysmic air and then folded into the long, pulsing drop to a truckle bed in a dark, cold room.

When the earth stopped rocking and settled, she wriggled from underneath him and sat up.

“I knew you were nearby,” she said. “Somehow, I knew.”

He grunted.

She was energized, as if he had been a marvelous infusion bringing her body back to life.

She wondered if there would be another baby, and the thought made her happy.

Her lover had relapsed into postcoital inertia. She jabbed a finger into his back. “Where’s Allie? Where are Gyltha and Mansur?”

“I sent them to the kitchens, the servants are having a revel.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

So that she could look at him, she got up and stumbled for the table, felt around, pinched some tinder out of its box, struck a flint, and lit a taper at its flame.

He was thin, oh, bless him, but beautiful. In trousers-now down around his hocks-like a peasant, his face smeared with what looked like tree bark.

“A wren hunter,” she said, delighted. “You came in with the wren hunters. Has Henry come?”

“Had to get in somehow. Thank God it’s Saint Stephen’s Day, or I’d have had to climb the bloody wall.”

“How did you know we’d be at Godstow?”

“With the river freezing? Where else would you be?”

He wasn’t responding properly. “We could be dead,” she pointed out. “We nearly were.”

He sat up. “I was in the trees,” he said, “watched you skating. Very graceful, a little shaky on the turns, perhaps…By the saints, that’s a bonny baby, isn’t she?”

Our baby, Adelia thought. She’s our bonny baby.

She punched his shoulder, not altogether playfully. “Damn you, Rowley. I suffered, I thought you were dead.”

“I knew that bit of the Thames,” he said, “that’s why I got off, belongs to Henry, part of Woodstock forest; there’s a river keeper close by-I’d baptized his child for him. I made for his cottage, wasn’t easy but I got there.” He sat up, suddenly. “Now then…what’s to do here?”

“Rowley, I suffered. ”

“No need. The keeper took me to Oxford-we used snow shoes. Bloody place was teeming with rebels, every bastard that had fought for Stephen and suffered for it was in arms and flying Eleanor’s standard or Young Henry’s. We had to bypass the town and make for Wallingford instead. Always a royal stronghold, Wallingford. The FitzCounts held it for the empress during the war. I knew the king’d go there first.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Jesus save me, but it was hard going.”

“Serve you right,” she said. “Did you find the king? Is he here?”

“More that he found me, really. I was laid up at Wallingford with a rheum in the chest, I damn near died. What I needed was a doctor.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t attend,” she said tartly.

“Yes, well, at least I could keep an eye on the river from there. And sure enough, he came, and a fleet of boats with him.” Rowley shook his head in wonder. “He was in Touraine, putting down Young Henry’s rebellion, when he heard about Rosamund. God punish that boy, now he’s joined with Louis of France against his own father. Louis , I ask you.” Rowley’s fists went to the sides of his head in disbelief. “We all knew he was an idiot, but who’d have dreamed the treacherous little whelp would go to his father’s greatest enemy for aid?”

He leaned forward. “And Eleanor had urged him to do it. Do you know that? Our spies told us. Urged their son against his father.”

“I don’t care,” she told him. “I don’t care what they do. What is happening now ?”

But she couldn’t shift him. He was still with Henry Plantagenet, who had captured two Touranian castles from the Young King’s supporters before making tracks for England with a small army in the heaviest winter in years.

“How he did it I don’t know. But here he comes, up the Thames, trailing boats full of men behind him. Did I tell you he was rowing ? The barge crew weren’t going fast enough for the bugger, and there he was, pulling at an oar like a pirate and swearing the sky black.”