Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

“If she kept one, she kept more.” He shouted for the housekeeper again. “ Dakers. She’ll know. Where is the hellhag?”

And then Adelia knew where Dakers was.

All the visits he’d made to this room, and he’d never known he was observed from a garderobe with a spy hole. He didn’t know now.

Eynsham was examining the table, sweeping its writing implements aside, sending the ancient bowl in which Rosamund had kept sweetmeats onto the floor, where it broke. He bent to look under the table. There was a grunt of satisfaction. He came up holding a crumpled piece of vellum. “Is this all there was?”

“How could I know?” It was the letter Rosamund had been writing to the queen, that Eleanor in her fury had thrown to the floor. Adelia had given the abbot’s template to poor Father Paton and, if she died for it, she wasn’t going to tell this man that there were others hidden in a box stool only inches from his right boot.

Let him doubt, let there be a worm of worry for as long as he lives.

Great God, he’s reading it.

The abbot had lumbered to the open window and was holding the parchment to the light. “Such an appalling hand the trollop had,” he said. “Still, it’s amazing she could write at all.”

And let Dakers doubt him. No wonder the housekeeper had laughed as they were taken to the boats that night; she’d seen Eynsham, who had always been Rosamund’s friend and, therefore, would be a friend to her.

If she was listening now, if she could be got to switch sides…

Adelia raised her voice. “Why did you make Rosamund write letters to Eleanor?”

The abbot lowered the parchment, partly exasperated, partly amused. “Listen to the creature. Why does she ask a question when her brain cannot possibly encompass the answer? What use to tell you? How can you even approach in understanding the exigencies that we, God’s agents, are put to in order to keep His world on its course, the descent we must make into the scum, the instruments we must use-harlots like that one on the bed, cutthroats, all the sweepings of the cesspit, to achieve a sacred aim.”

He was telling her anyway. A wordy man. A man needing the reassurance of his own voice and, even more, the sanctification of what he had done.

And still hopeful. It surprised her. That he was having to abandon his great game as a lost cause and desert his championship of Eleanor was stimulating him, as if certain he could retrieve the situation with charm, tactics, a murder here or there, using the false urbanity, his common-man-with-learning, all the air in the balloon that had bounced him into the halls of popes and royalty…

A mountebank, really , Adelia thought.

Also a virgin. Mansur had seen it, told her, but Mansur, with the superiority of a man who could hold an erection, had discounted the agony of supposed failure turned to malevolence. Another churchman might bless a condition that ensured his chastity, but not this one; he wanted, lusted after, that most natural and commonplace gift that he was denied.

Perhaps he was making the world pay for it, meddling with brilliance in high politics, pushing men and women round his chess board, discarding this one, moving that one, compensating himself for the appalling curiosity that kept him outside their Garden of Eden as he jumped up and down in an effort to see inside it.

“To stimulate war, my dear,” he was saying. “Can you understand that? Of course you can’t-you are the clay from which you were made and the clay to which you will return. A war to cleanse the land of a barbarous and unclean king. To avenge poor Becket. To return England to God’s writ.”

“Rosamund’s letters would do all that?” she asked.

He looked up. “Yes, as a matter of fact. A wronged and vengeful woman, and believe me, nobody is more vengeful than our gracious Eleanor, will escape any bonds, climb any mountains, cross all oceans to wreak havoc on the wrongdoer. And thus she did.”

“Then why did you have Rosamund poisoned?”

“Who says I did?” Very sharp.

“Your assassin.”

“The merry Jacques has been chattering, has he? I must set Schwyz onto that young man.”

“People will think the queen did it.”

“The king does, as was intended,” he said vaguely. “Barbarians, my dear, are easily manipulated.” He turned back to the letter and continued to read. “Excellent, oh excellent,” he said. “I’d forgotten…To the ‘supposed Queen of England…from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.’ What I had to endure to persuade that tedious wench to this…Robert, Robert, such a subtle fellow you are…”

A draft twitched at Adelia’s cloak. The hanging behind Rosamund’s bed had lifted. As air came up the corbel of the hidden garderobe and into the room, it brought a different, a commoner stench to counter that of the poor corpse on the bed. It was cut off as the hanging dropped back.

Adelia walked across to the window. The abbot was still holding the letter to the light, reading it. She took up a position where, if he looked up, he would see her and not the figure creeping down the side of the bed. It had no knife in its hand, but it was still death-this time, its own.

Dakers was dying; Adelia had seen that yellowish skin and receded eyes too often not to know what they meant. The fact that the woman was walking at all was a miracle, but she was. And silently.

Help me, Adelia willed her. Do something. Without moving, she used her eyes in appeal. Help me.

But Dakers didn’t look at her, nor at the abbot. All her energy was bent on reaching the staircase.

Adelia watched the woman slip between the partially open door and its frame without touching either and disappear. She felt a tearing resentment. You could have hit him with something.

The abbot had sat himself in Rosamund’s chair as he read, still muttering bits of the letter out loud. “‘…and I did please the king in bed as you never did, so he told me…’ I’ll wager you did, girl. Sucking and licking, I’ll wager you did. ‘…he did moan with delight…’ I’ll wager he did, you filthy trollop…”

He’s exciting himself with his own words.

As Adelia thought it, he glanced up-into her eyes. His face gorged. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” she told him. “I am looking at you and seeing nothing.”

Schwyz was calling from the stairs, but his voice was drowned in Eynsham’s scream: “You judge me ? You, a whore…judge me ?”

He got up, a gigantic wave rising, and engulfed her. He clutched her to his chest and carried her so that her feet trailed between his knees. Blinded, she thought he was going to drop her out of the window, but he turned her round, holding her high by the scruff of the neck and her belt. For a second, she glimpsed the bed, heard the grunt as she was thrown down onto what lay on it.

As Adelia’s body landed on the corpse, its belly expelled its gases with a whistle.

The abbot was screaming. “Kiss her. Kiss, kiss, kiss…suck, lick, you bitches.” He pushed her face into Rosamund’s. He was twisting Adelia’s head like a piece of fruit, pressing it down into the grease. “Sniff, suck, lick…”

She was suffocating in decomposing flesh.

“Rob. Rob.”

The pressure on her head lessened slightly, and she managed to turn her smeared face sideways and breathe.

“Rob. Rob. There’s a horse in the stable.”

It stopped. It had stopped.

“No rider,” Schwyz said. “Can’t find a rider, but there’s somebody here.”

“What sort of horse?”

“Destrier. A good one.”