Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

She was thrown to one side. Schwyz roared, “There he is. Opposite bank. Loso. Johannes.”

Two men leaped for the door. Another took Schwyz’s place at the window, frantically winding a crossbow, his foot in its stirrup. He aimed, loosed. “Ach, scheiss.” He looked at Schwyz. “Nein.”

Adelia closed her eyes, then opened them. There was another step on the outside landing.

A giant figure bowed its head to get through the door and looked calmly around. “Perhaps it would be better if we relieved Mistress Adelia of her dagger.”

She wouldn’t have used it on a human being in any case. She handed it over, hilt first, to the Abbot of Eynsham, who had written the letters for Rosamund to copy and send to the queen, and then had her killed.

He thanked her, and she went down on her knees to attend to Ward, where he had crawled under one of the beds. As she felt the kicked and broken rib, he looked at her with self-pitying eyes. She patted him. “You’ll live,” she said. “Good dog. Stay here.”

Politely, the abbot held her cloak for her while she put it on, then her hands were tied behind her back and a gag put in her mouth.

They took her to the gatekeeper’s lodge.

There was nobody else about; the abbey had gone to bed. Even if she’d been able to shout for help, nobody at this end of the convent would have heard her-or come to her rescue if they had. Master and Mistress Bloat were not on her side. Lawyer Warin most definitely was not. There was no sign of Wolvercote’s men, but they wouldn’t have helped her, either.

The great gates were open, but all activity was centered in the lodge chamber that led off the porch, where Schwyz’s men hurried to and fro.

They pushed Adelia inside. Fitchet was dead on the floor, his throat cut. Father Paton lay alongside him, coughing out some of his teeth.

She slid to kneel beside the priest. Beneath the bruises, his face showed indignation. “Kep’ hi’n me,” he said. “Too le’ers.” He tried harder. “Took the letters.”

Men were fastening hoods and cloaks, collecting weapons into bundles, emptying Fitchet’s food cupboard, and rounding up some frightened hens into a crate.

“Did our worthy gatekeeper possess such a thing as wine?” The abbot asked. “No? Tut, tut, how I loathe ale.” He sat on a stool, watching the bustle, fingering the huge cross on his chest.

The two mercenaries who had chased after Rowley came in, panting. “He had horses.”

“ Siech. That ends it, then. We go.” Schwyz took hold of the pinion round Adelia’s hands and jerked her to her feet with an upward pull that nearly displaced her shoulders. He dragged her over to the abbot. “We don’t need her, let me kill the whore.”

“Schwyz, my dear, good Schwyz.” Eynsham shook his great head. “It seems to have escaped your notice that at this moment, Mistress Adelia is the most valuable object in the convent, the king’s desire for her company being such that he sends a bishop to collect her-whether for her sexual prowess or such information as she may possess is yet to be determined. She is our trump card, my dear, the Atalantean golden apple that we may have to throw behind us to delay pursuit…” He reflected. “We might even appease the king by handing her back to him, should he catch up with us…yes…that is a possibility.”

Schwyz had no time for this. “Do we take her or not?”

“We do.”

“And the priest?”

“Well, there I fear we must be less forgiving. Master Paton’s possession of the letters is unfortunate. He has evidence I would not wish king or queen to hear, even supposing he could voice it, which-”

“Christ’s eyes, do I finish him?”

“You do.”

“Nnnnnn.” Adelia threw herself forward. Schwyz pulled her back.

“I know, I know.” The abbot nodded. “These things are upsetting, but I have no wish to lose the queen’s esteem, and I fear Father Paton could disabuse her of it. Did you provide him with my text on which dear Rosamund based her letters? Of course you did. What an enterprising little soul you are.”

He was talking. He’d condemned the priest to death and he was talking, amused.

“Since I stand in high regard with our blessed Eleanor, it would be-what is the word?- inconvenient if she knew I was the goad that pricked her into further rebellion. In view of my desertion, she might tell Henry. As it is, she will be informed of a murderous intruder to the abbey, d’ye see, and that we, the good Schwyz and myself, are in brave pursuit to stop him before he reaches the king’s lines. In fact, of course, we are leaving the lady to her inevitable fate; the snow has proved too much for us, the amiable Lord Wolvercote too little… As Master Schwyz says of that gentleman in his rough way-he couldn’t fight a sack of shit.”

Schwyz had let go of her and was walking toward Father Paton.

Adelia closed her eyes. God, I beg you.

A whimper from Father Paton, a hot smell. A hush, as if even this company was awed by the passage of a soul to its maker.

Then somebody said something, somebody else laughed. Men began carrying bundles and crates out to the porch and down to the river.

The abbot’s finger went under Adelia’s chin and tilted her head.

“You interest me, madam, you always have. How does a foreign slut like yourself command the attention not only of a bishop but a king? And you, forgive me, without an apparent grace to bless yourself with.”

Keeping her eyes closed, she jerked away from him, but he grasped her face and angled it back and forth. “Do you satisfy them both? At the same time? Are you a mistress of threesomes? Do you excel at lit à trois ? Cock below and behind? Arsehole and pudendum muliebre ? What my father in his elegant way used to call a bum- and -belly?”

There would be a lot of this before the end, she thought.

She looked straight into his eyes.

Great God, he’s a virgin.

How she knew it in that extremity…but she knew it.

The face above hers diminished into an agonized, pleading vulnerability- Don’t know me, don’t know me -before it resumed the trompe l’oeil that was the Abbot of Eynsham.

Schwyz had been shouting at them both; now he came and hauled Adelia upright. “She better be no trouble,” he said. “We got enough to carry.”

“I am sure she won’t be.” The abbot smiled on Adelia. “We could send to the kitchen for the baby if you prefer and take it with us, though whether it would survive the journey…”

She shook her head.

Eynsham, still smiling, gestured toward the door. “After you, mistress.”

She went through it and down the ice steps like a lamb.

T he moon had edged a little toward the west, so that two more cloaked mercenaries cast long, sharp, stunted shadows on the ice as they loaded a large sledge with the packages the others were bringing down. One of them picked up Adelia and slung her on top of the bundles, hurting her arms as she landed on them. Somebody else slung a tarpaulin over her, and she had to toss her head round until a fold fell back and she could see.

Go south, she thought. Make them go south, Henry’s there. Lord, make them go south.

The abbot, Schwyz, and some of the other men were clustered around her, balancing against the sides of the sledge as they put on skates, intent, not talking.

They have to go south-they don’t know the king’s attacking Oxford.

Oh, but of course they did. They knew everything-Rowley had inadvertently told them.

Lord, send them south.