Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

He must know where she is, Adelia thought. The only life here is in the top room with the dead.

“Up you go, then.” Schwyz turned away to give orders to his men, and then turned back. “What do you want done with the trollop?”

“ This trollop?” The abbot looked down at Adelia. “We’ll hang on to her until the last minute, I think, just in case. She can come up and help me look for the letters.”

“Why? She’ll be better down here.” Schwyz was jealous.

The abbot was patient with him. “Because I didn’t see any letters lying around when we were here last, but little Mistress Big Eyes had one, hadn’t you, my dear? If she found one, she can find the others. Bind her hands, if you like, but in front this time and not too tight; she’s looking wan.”

Adelia’s hands were pinioned again-not gently, either.

“Up, up.” The abbot pointed her toward the stairs. “Up, up, up.” To the mercenary, he said, “Tell the men to put their minds to my dinner. And Schwyz…” The tone had changed.

“What?”

“Set a damn good watch on that river.”

He’s frightened , Adelia thought suddenly. He, too, credits Henry with supernatural powers. Oh, dear God, let him be right.

Going up the tiny, wedge-shaped, slippery, winding steps without the balancing use of hands was not easy, but Adelia did better than the abbot, who was grunting with effort before they reached the second landing. That was the stage where the tower cut them off from the noise at its base, imposing a silence in which the echo of their footsteps troubled the ears as if they disobeyed an ordinance from the dead. Go back. This is a tomb.

Light that was hardly light at all came, sluggish, through the arrow slits onto the same broken mess that had littered the landings when she’d climbed up here with Rowley. Nobody had swept it away, nobody ever would.

Up and up, past Rosamund’s apartments, empty of their carpets and gold ornaments now, looted by mercenaries, maybe even the Aquitanians, while Eleanor had kept her vigil over a corpse. Much good it had done them; loot and looters had gone to the bottom of the Thames.

They were getting close to the top now.

I don’t want to go in there. Why doesn’t it stop? It’s impossible I should die here. Why doesn’t somebody stop this?

The last landing, the door a crack open but with its ornate key in the lock.

Adelia stood back. “I’m not going in.”

Gripping her shoulder, the abbot pushed her in front of him. “Dakers, my dame. Here’s the Abbot of Eynsham, your old friend, come to pay his respects to your mistress.”

A smell like a blast of wind teetered him on the threshold.

The room was furnished as Adelia had last seen it. No looting here-there hadn’t been time.

Rosamund no longer sat at the writing table, but something lay on the bed with the frail curtains framing it and a cloak covering its upper half.

There was no sign of Dakers, but, if she had wanted to preserve her mistress still, she had made the mistake of closing the windows and lighting funerary candles.

“Dear God.” With a handkerchief to his nose, the abbot hurried around the room, blowing out candles and opening the windows. “Dear God, the whore stinks. Dear God.”

Moist, gray air refreshed the chamber slightly.

Eynsham came back to the bed, his eyes fascinated.

“Leave her,” Adelia advised him.

He whipped the cloak off the body and let it fall to the floor.

“Aach.”

Her lovely hair fanned out from the decomposing face onto a pillow, with another pillow propping her crown near the top of her head. The crossed hands on her breast were mercifully hidden by a prayer book. Feet bulged wetly out of the tiny gold slippers that peeped from under the graceful, carefully arranged folds of a gown as blue as a spring sky. Patches of ooze were staining its silk.

“My, my,” said the abbot, softly. “ Sic transit Rosa Mundi. So the rose of all the world rots like any other…Rosamund the Foul…”

“Don’t you dare,” Adelia shouted at him. If she’d had her hands free, she’d have hit him. “Don’t you dare mock her. You brought her to this, and, by God, this is what you’ll come to-your soul with it.”

“Oof.” He stepped back like a child faced by a furious parent. “Well, it’s a horror…admit it’s a horror.”

“I don’t care. You treat her with respect.”

For a moment he was wrong-footed by his own lapse in taste. Tentatively, standing well back from the bed, his hand traced a blessing in the air toward it. “Requiescat in pace.” After a moment, he said, “What is that white stuff growing out of her face?”

“Grave wax,” Adelia told him. Actually, it was very interesting; she’d not seen it on a human flesh before, only on that of a sow at the death farm.

For a moment she was a mistress in the art of death again, aware only of the phenomenon in front of her, vaguely irritated that lack of time and means were preventing her from examining it.

It’s because she was fat, she thought. The sow in Salerno had been fat, and Gordinus had kept it in an airtight tin chest away from flies. “You see, my child? Bereft of insects, this white grease-I call it corpus adipatus -will accrete on plumper areas, cheeks, breasts, buttocks, et cetera, and hold back putrefaction, yes, actually delay it. Though whether it causes the delay or the delay causes it is yet to be determined.”

Bless him, Gordinus had called it a marvel, which it was, and damn it that she was seeing it manifest on a human corpse only now.

It was especially interesting that the room’s new warmth was, to judge from what was seeping through Rosamund’s gown, bringing on putrefaction at the selfsame time. That couldn’t be caused by flies-could it?-there were none at this time of year…blast it, if her hands were free, she could find out what was breeding under the material…

“Oh, what?” she asked, crossly. The abbot was pulling at her.

“Where does she keep the letters?”

“What letters?” This opportunity to advance knowledge might never come again. If it wasn’t flies…

He swung her round to face him. “Let me explain the position to you, my dear. In all this I have only been pursuing my Christian duty to bring down a king who had the good Saint Thomas murdered on the steps of his own cathedral. I intended a civil war that our gracious queen would win. Since that outcome now seems unlikely, I need to retrieve my position because, if Henry finds my letters, Henry will send them to the Pope. And will the Holy Father sanction what I have done to punish the wicked? Will he say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful Robert of Eynsham, you have advanced our great cause’? He will not. He must pretend outrage, because a worthless whore was poisoned in the process. He will wash his Pilate’s hands. Will there be oak leaves? Reward? Ah, no.”

He stopped savoring the sound of his own voice. “Find those letters for me, mistress, or when Henry comes he will discover in the ashes of his bordello the bones of not just one of his harlots but two.” He was diverted by a happy thought. “Together, in each other’s arms, perhaps. Yes, perhaps…”

He mustn’t see that she was afraid; he mustn’t see that she was afraid. “In that case, the letters will be burned, too,” she said.

“Not if the bitch kept them in a metal box. Where are they? You had one, mistress, and were quick enough to show it around.

Where did she keep the letters? ”

“On the table, I took it from the table.”