Ariana Franklin - The Serpent’s Tale

It was a strange dinner. Bishop Rowley was being forced to put his case to a Cambridgeshire housekeeper and an Arab because the woman he needed to solve it would not look at him. Adelia sat silent and unresponsive, eating very little.

He’s a different creature, there’s nothing of the man I knew. Damn him, how was it so easy for him to stop loving me?

The secretary, disregarded by everybody, ate like a man with hollow legs, though his eyes were always on his master, as if watching for further unepiscopal behavior.

The bishop explained the circumstances that had brought him hurrying from Oxford, part of his diocese, and tomorrow would take him to Normandy to search out the king and tell him, before anybody else did, that Rosamund Clifford, most beloved of all the royal mistresses, had been fed poisonous mushrooms.

“Mushrooms?” Gyltha asked. “Could’ve been mischance, then. Tricky things, mushrooms, you got to be careful.”

“It was deliberate,” the bishop said. “Believe me, Gyltha, this was not an accident. She became very ill. It was why they called me to Wormhold, to her sickbed; they didn’t think she’d recover. Thanks to the mercy of Christ, she did, but the king will wish to know the identity of the poisoner, and I want, I have , to assure him that his favorite investigator is looking into the matter…” He remembered to bow to Mansur, who bowed back. “Along with his assistant.” A bow to Adelia.

She was relieved that he was maintaining the fiction in front of Father Paton that it was Mansur who possessed the necessary skills for such an investigation-not her. He had betrayed himself to a charge of immorality by saying that Allie was his, but he was protecting her from the much more serious charge of witchcraft.

Gyltha, enjoying her role as interrogator, said, “Can’t’ve been the queen sent her them mushrooms, can it? Her being in chains and all?”

“I wish she had been in bloody chains.” Rowley was Rowley again for a moment, furious and making his secretary blink. “The blasted woman escaped. Two weeks ago.”

“Deary dear,” Gyltha said.

“Deary dear indeed, and was last seen heading for England, which, in everybody’s opinion bar mine, would give her time to poison a dozen of Henry’s whores.”

He leaned across the table to Adelia, sweeping a space between them, spilling his wine bowl and hers. “ You know him, you know his temper. You’ve seen him out of control. He loves Rosamund, truly loves her. Suppose he shouts for Eleanor’s death like he shouted for Becket’s? He won’t mean it, but there’s always some bastard with a reason to respond who’ll say he’s doing it on the king’s orders, like they did with Becket. And if their mother’s executed, all the boys will rise up against their father like a tide of shit.”

He sat back in his chair. “Civil war? It’ll be here, everywhere. Stephen and Matilda will be nothing to it.”

Mansur put his hand protectively on Gyltha’s shoulder. The silence was turbulent, as if from noiseless battle and dumbed shrieks of the dying. The ghost of a murdered archbishop rose up from the stones of Canterbury and stalked the room.

Father Paton was staring from face to face, puzzled that his bishop should be addressing the doctor’s assistant with such vehemence, and not the doctor.

“Did she do it?” Adelia asked at last.

“No.” Rowley wiped some grease off his sleeve with a napkin, and replenished his bowl.

“Are you sure?”

“Not Eleanor. I know her.”

Does he? Undoubtedly, there was tender regard between queen and bishop; when Eleanor and Henry’s firstborn son had died at the age of three, Eleanor had wanted the child’s sword taken to Jerusalem so that, in death, little William might be regarded as a holy crusader. It was Rowley who’d made the terrible journey and lain the tiny sword on the high altar-so of course Eleanor looked on Rowley kindly.

But like everything else in royal matters, it was King Henry who’d arranged it, Henry who’d given Rowley his orders, Henry who’d received the intelligence of what was going on in the Holy Land that Rowley’d brought back with him. Oh, yes, Rowley Picot had been more the king’s agent than the queen’s sword carrier.

But still claiming special knowledge of Eleanor’s character, the bishop added, “Face-to-face, she’d tear Rosamund’s throat out…but not poison. It’s not her style.”

Adelia nodded. She said in Arabic, “I still don’t see what you want of me. I am a doctor to the dead…”

“You have a logical mind,” the bishop said, also in Arabic. “You see things others don’t. Who saved the Jews from the accusation of child murder last year? Who found the true killer?”

“I had assistance.” That good little man Simon of Naples, the real investigator who had come with her from Salerno for the purpose and had died for it.

Mansur, unusual for him, struck in, indicating Adelia. “She must not be put in such danger again. The will of Allah and only the will of Allah saved her from the pit last time.”

Adelia smiled fondly at him. Let him attribute it to Allah if he liked. Actually, she had survived the child killer’s lair only because a dog had led Rowley to it in time. What neither he, nor God, nor Allah had saved her from were memories of a nightmare that still reenacted themselves in her daily life as sharply as if they were happening all over again-often, this time, to young Allie.

“Of course she won’t be in danger again,” the bishop told Mansur with energy. “This case is completely different. There’s been no murder here, only a clumsy attempt at one. Whoever tried to do it is long gone. But don’t you see?” Another bowl tipped as he thumped the board. “ Don’t you see? Everybody will believe Eleanor to be the poisoner; she hates Rosamund and she was possibly in the neighborhood. Wasn’t that Gyltha’s immediate conclusion? Won’t it be the world’s?” He took his eyes away from Mansur and to the woman opposite him. “In the name of God, Adelia, help me. ”

With a jerk of her chin toward the door, Gyltha nudged Mansur, who nodded, rose, and took an unwilling Father Paton by the scruff of his neck.

The two who remained seated at the table didn’t notice their going. The bishop’s gaze was on Adelia; hers on her clasped hands.

Stop resenting him, she was thinking. It wasn’t abandonment; mine was the refusal to marry, only mine the insistence we shouldn’t meet again. It is illogical to blame him for keeping to the agreement.

Damn him, though, there should have been something all these months-at least an acknowledgment of the baby.

“How are you and God getting along?” she asked.

“I serve Him, I hope.” She heard amusement in his voice.

“Good works?”

“When I can.”

She thought, And we both know, don’t we, that you would sacrifice God and His works, me and your daughter, all of us, if doing so would serve Henry Plantagenet.

He said quietly, “I apologize for this, Adelia. I would not have broken our agreement not to meet again for anything less.”

She said, “If Eleanor is proved guilty, I won’t lie. I shall say so.”

“Ya- hah. ” Now that was Rowley, the energy, the shout that shivered the wine in its jug-here, for an instant, was her joyous lover back again.

“Couldn’t resist, could you? Are you taking the baby with you? Yes, of course, you’ll still be breast-feeding-damned odd to think of you as lactating stock.”

He was up and had opened the door, calling for Paton. “There’s a basket of mushrooms in my pack. Find it and bring it here.” He turned to Adelia, grinning. “Thought you’d want to see some evidence.”