“So’s they’m split up and not one of ’em where there’s girls,” Gyltha said approvingly. “She’s a wily one, that Ma Edyve.” It was Gyltha who had carried the report of the events at Wormhold to the abbess. Adelia was too tired and, anyway, hadn’t been able to face telling her of Rowley’s death.
“She don’t believe it,” Gyltha said on her return. “No more don’t I. Now, then, let’s be seeing to you two.”
Mansur hated fuss and kept declaring that he was well, but he had been exposed to the open cold while poling the barge as Adelia, Jacques, and Walt had not, and she and Gyltha were worried about him.
“Look what you done to your hands, you great gawk,” Gyltha said. Her disquiet always took the form of anger. Mansur’s palms were bleeding where his mittens, and then his skin, had worn through against the wood of the pole.
Adelia was concerned more for his fingers, which were white and shiny where they emerged from the wrecked mittens. “Frostbite.”
“They cause me no pain,” Mansur said stolidly.
“They will in a minute,” Adelia promised.
Gyltha ran to Mansur’s lodging to get him a dry gown and cloak, and brought back with her a bucket of hot water from the kitchen and would have plunged her lover’s hands into it, but Adelia stopped her. “Wait til it cools a little.”
She also prevented Gyltha from hooking the brazier nearer to him. The condition of frostbite had interested her foster father after he’d seen the effects of it during their holidays in the Alps—he had actually braved a winter there to study it—and his conclusion had been that the warming must be gradual.
Young Allie, always deprived of burning herself on the brazier—it was kept within a guard—turned her attention to trying to pull the bucket over her head. Adelia would have enjoyed watching the resulting tussle between Gyltha and that remarkable child if her own toes hadn’t ached agonizingly with the return of blood to frozen muscle and bone.
She estimated the worth of dosing herself and Mansur with willow-bark decoction for the pain and then rejected it; each of them was a stoic, and the fact that her toes and his fingers were turning red without blistering indicated that the affliction was mild—better to keep the drug for those in whom it might be worse.
She crawled onto the bed to suffer in comfort. Ward leaped on after her, and she had neither the energy nor will to turn him off. The dog had shared his body heat with her on the boat—what were a few fleas if she shared hers with him?
“What did you do with Dakers?” she asked.
“Oh, her.” Gyltha had not taken to the walking skeleton that Adelia had dragged, unaware that she was dragging it, through the convent gates, but had seen, because Adelia was dragging it, that there was a necessity to keep it alive. “I give her to Sister Havis, and she give her to Sister Jennet in the infirmary. She’s all right, ugly thing.”
“Well done.” Adelia closed her eyes.
“Don’t you want to know who’s turned up here since you been away?”
“No”.
When she woke up, it was afternoon. Mansur had gone back to the men’s guesthouse to rest. Gyltha was sitting beside the bed, knitting—a skill she’d picked up from one of her Scandinavian customers during her eel-selling days.
Adelia’s eyes rested on the chubby little figure of Allie as it hitched itself around the floor on its bottom, chasing the dog and grimacing to show the one tiny tooth that had manifested itself in her lower gum since her mother had last seen her. “I swear I’ll never leave you again,” she told her.
Gyltha snorted. “I keep telling you, ’twas only thirty hours.”
But Adelia knew the separation had been longer than that. “It was nearly permanent,” she’d said, and added painfully, “For Rowley, it has been.”
Gyltha wouldn’t countenance it. “He’ll be back, large as life and twice as natural. Take more than a bit of old snow to finish off that lad.” To Gyltha, the Right Reverend Lord Bishop of Saint Albans would always be “that lad.”
“He can stay away for me,” Adelia said. She clung on to her grievance against him like a raft to keep her from being subsumed in grief. “He didn’t care, Gyltha, not for his life, not Allie’s, not mine.”
“Except to make the sun come up.”
“A’course he didn’t, he’s out to stop a war as’ll take more lives than yours. God’s work that is, and the Lord’ll watch over un according.”
Adelia clung to that, too, but she had been deeply frightened. “I don’t care, if it’s God’s work, let Him do it. We are leaving. As soon as the snow clears, we’re all slipping away back to the fens.”
“Oh, ar?” Gyltha said.
“It’s not ‘oh, ar.’ I mean it.” In the fens, her life had been acceptable, regulated, useful. She’d been ripped away from it, subjected to, and then abandoned in, physical and mental turmoil by the man at whose request she had become embroiled in it in the first place. Almost worse than anything, he had revived in her an emotion that she’d thought to be dead, that was better dead.
“Except to make the sun come up.”
Damn him, don’t think of it.
Gaining anger, she said, “It’s all high politics, anyway. That’s what Rosamund’s killing was, as far as I can see—an assassination to do with queens and kings and political advantage. It’s outside my scope. Was it the mushrooms? Yes, it probably was. Do I know who sent them? No, I don’t, and there’s an end to it. I’m a doctor, I won’t be drawn into their wars. God’s rib, Gyltha, Eleanor abducted me, abducted me—I nearly ended up joining her damned army.”
“Shouldn’t have saved her life, then, should you?”
“What was I to do? Dakers was coming at her with a knife.”
“You sure you don’t want to know who else’s turned up?”
“No. I only want to know whether anybody’s likely to stop us going.”
But it appeared that in the physical collapse affecting all the travelers, even Eleanor, on their arrival at the convent, nobody had spared a thought for the woman who had saved the queen’s life—or, for that matter, the woman who had nearly taken it. The priority had been a place to get warm and to sleep.
Perhaps, Adelia thought, the queen had forgotten Dakers and herself altogether and, when the roads were open again, would proceed to Oxford without attending to either. By which time Adelia would be beyond reach, taking Gyltha, Mansur, and Allie with her and leaving Dame Dakers to her own hideous devices—she no longer cared what they were.
Gyltha went to fetch their supper from the kitchen.
Adelia leaned down from the bed, picked up her daughter, pressing her nose against the warm satin of the child’s cheek, and propped her up against her own knees so that they faced each other.
“We’re going home, aren’t we, mistress? Yes, we are. We won’t get involved in their old wars, will we? No, we won’t. We’ll go far off, we’ll go back to Salerno, we don’t care what that nasty old King Henry says, do we? We’ll find the money from somewhere. It’s no good making faces ...” For Allie was extending her lower lip and showing her new tooth in an expression reminiscent of the camel in Salerno’s menagerie. “You’ll like Salerno, it’s warm. We’ll take Mansur and Gyltha and Ulf, yes, we will. You miss Ulf, don’t you? So do I.”
On an investigation like this—had she been going to proceed with it—Gyltha’s grandson would have been her eyes and ears, able to go about unremarked as only an eleven-year-old urchin could, his plain, very plain, features giving the lie to his extreme intelligence.
Nevertheless, Adelia thanked her God that Ulf, at least, was out of harm’s way. She found herself wondering, though, what the boy would have said about the situation ...
Allie started wriggling, wanting to continue with her persecution of Ward, so Adelia set her down absently, listening to a harsh little voice in her head that asked questions like an insistent crow.
Two murders, ain’t there? Rosamund’s and the fella on the bridge? You think they’re connec
ted?
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” she answered out loud.
It was goin’ to depend on who turned up, weren’t it? Somebody was, to see why there hadn’t been no fuss about the dead un on the bridge? Whoever done it wanted him dead, din’t they? An’ wanted a hullabaloo about it, din’t they?
“Such was my assumption. But there hasn’t been time, the snow would have delayed them.”
Somebody’s come.
“I don’t care. I’m going home, I’m frightened.” Leavin’ the poor bugger in the icehouse, is that it? Very godly, I’m sure.
“Oh, shut up.”
Adelia liked order; in a sense, it was what her profession was about—and you could say this for the dead, they didn’t make unexpected moves or threaten you with a knife. To be out of control and at the whim of others, especially the malignantly inclined, as she had been at Wormhold and on the river, had discomposed her very being.
The convent enfolded her; the long, low, plain room spoke soothingly of proportion. It was dark outside now, and the glow of the brazier gave a shadow to each of the beams in the ceiling, making a pleasingly uniform pattern of dark and not-sodark stripes against white plaster. Even muffled by the wool that Gyltha had stuffed in the cracks of the shutters to keep out the cold, the distant sound of the nuns singing Vespers was a reassurance of a thousand years of disciplined routine.
And all of it an illusion, because a corpse lay in its icehouse and, seven miles away, a dead woman sat at a writing table, both of them waiting ... for what?
Resolution.
Adelia pleaded with them: I can’t give it to you, I’m frightened, I want to go home.
But jagged, almost forgotten images kept nudging at her mind: snowy footprints on a bridge, a letter crumpled in a saddlebag, other letters, copied letters, Bertha’s piglike nose snuffling at a scent ...
Gyltha returned carrying a large pot of mutton and vegetables in broth, some spoons, a loaf tucked under one arm, and a leather bottle of ale under the other. She poured some of the broth into Allie’s bowl and began mashing it to a pulp, putting the pieces of meat into her mouth and chewing them with her big, strong teeth until they, too, were pulp, then returning them to the bowl. “Turnip and barley,” she said. “I’ll say this much for the sisters, they do a fair supper. And good, warm milk from the cow with little un’s porridge this morning.”
Reluctantly, because to mention one of the convent’s problems was somehow to solidify it, Adelia asked, “Is Bertha still in the cowshed?”
“Won’t come out, poor soul. That old Dakers still want to scrag her?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
Feeding Allie, who was making spirited attempts to feed herself, took concentration that allowed no thought for anything else.
When they’d wiped food off her hair as well as off their own, the child was put down to sleep and the two women ate their supper in silence, their feet stretched out to the brazier, passing the ale bottle back and forth between them.
Warm, the pain beginning to lessen, Adelia thought that such security as there was in her world rested at this moment in the gaunt old woman on the stool opposite hers. A day didn’t go by without a reminder of the gratitude she owed to Prior Geoffrey for their introduction, nor a strike of fear that Gyltha might leave her, nor, for that matter, puzzlement at why she stayed.
Adelia said, “Do you mind being here, Gyltha?”
“Ain’t got no choice, girl. We’m snowed up. Been snowing again, if you’d notice. Path down to the river’s gone and blocked itself again.”
“I mean, galloping across country to get here, away from home, murder ... everything. You never complain.” Gyltha picked a strand of mutton from her teeth, considered it, and popped it back into her mouth. “Somewhere to see, I suppose,” she said.
Perhaps that was it. Women generally had to stay where they were put, which in Gyltha’s case had been Cambridgeshire fenland, a place that Adelia found endlessly exotic but that was undoubtedly very flat. Why should not Gyltha’s heart drum to adventure in foreign places like any crusader’s? Or long to see God’s peace retained in her country as much as Rowley did? Or require, despite the risk, to see God’s justice done on those who killed?
Adelia shook her head at her. “What would I do without you?”
Gyltha poured the remnants of the broth from Adelia’s bowl into hers and put it down on the floor for Ward. “For a start, you wouldn’t have no time to find out who done in that poor lad, nor who it was done for Rosamund,” she said.
“Oh,” Adelia said, sighing. “Very well, tell me.”
“Tell ee what?” But Gyltha was smirking a satisfied smirk.
“You know very well. Who’s arrived? Who’s been asking questions about the boy in the icehouse? Somebody wanted him found and, sure as taxes, that somebody is going to question why he hasn’t been. Who is it?”
It was more than one. As if blown ahead of the snow that had now encased them, four people had arrived at Godstow during Adelia’s absence.
“Master and Mistress Bloat of Abingdon, they’re ma and pa to that young Emma as you took to. Come to see her married.”
“What are they like?”
“Big.” Gyltha spread her arms as if to encompass tree trunks. “Big bellies, big words, big voices—he has, anyhow, bellows like a bull as how he ships more wine from foreign parts than anybody else, sells more’n anybody else—for a nicer price than anybody else, I wouldn’t be surprised. Hog on a high horse, he is.”
By which Adelia gathered that Master Bloat reveled in a position he’d not been born to. “And his wife?”
In answer, Gyltha arranged her mouth into a ferocious simper, picked up the ale bottle, and ostentatiously prinked her little finger as she pretended to drink from it. She hadn’t taken to the Bloats.
“Unlikely murderers, though,” Adelia said. “Who else?”
“Their son-in-law-as-will-be.”
Another person with a valid reason for coming to Godstow. “Aaaah.” So the beautiful, gallant writer of poetry had come to take his bride. How nice for that wild, charming girl, how nice that love would lighten the winter darkness for a while at least. “How did he get here?”
Gyltha shrugged. “Arrived from Oxford afore the blizzard set in, like the others. Seems he’s lord of the manor over the bridge, though he don’t spend much time there. Run-down old ruin, Polly says it is.” Gyltha had made friends in the kitchen.
“His pa as took Stephen’s side in the war had a castle further upriver during the war, the which King Henry made un pull it down.”
“Is he as handsome as Emma thinks he is?”
But Adelia saw that here was another that hadn’t been taken to—this time, in depth. “Handsome is as handsome does,” Gyltha said. “Older’n I expected, and a proper lord, too, from his way of ordering people about. Been married before, but her died. The Bloats is lickin’ his boots for the favor of him making their girl a noblewoman.” Gyltha leaned forward slightly. “And him kindly accepting two hundred marks in gold as comes with her for a dowry.”
“Two hundred marks?” An immense sum.
“So Polly says. In gold.” Gyltha nodded. “Ain’t short of a shilling or two, our Master Bloat.”
“He can’t be. Still, if he’s prepared to purchase his daughter’s happiness ...” She paused. “Is she happy?”
Gyltha shrugged. “Ain’t seen her. She’s kept to the cloisters. I’da thought she’d come rushing to see this Lord Wolvercote ...”
“Wolvercote?”
“That’s his lordship’s name. Suits him, an’ all; he do look proper wolfish.”
“Gyltha ... Wolvercote, that’s the man ... he’s the one who’s raised an army for the queen. He’s supposed to be at Oxford, waiting for Eleanor to join him.”
“Well, he ain’t, he’s here.”
“Is he now? But ...” Adelia was determined to follow the gleam of romance where it led. “He’s not a likely murderer, eithe
r. It speaks well for him if he’s prepared to delay a war because he can’t wait to marry young Emma.”
“He’s delayin’ it,” Gyltha pointed out, “for young Emma plus two hundred marks. In gold.” She leaned forward, pointing with her knitting needle. “You know the first thing he do when he got back to the village? Finds a couple of rogues robbin’ his manor and hangs ’em quicker’n buttered lightning.”
“The two on the bridge? I wondered about them.”
“Sister Havis ain’t happy. She made a right to-do about it, according to Polly. See, it’s the abbey’s bridge, and the sisters don’t like it being decorated with corpses. ‘You take ’em down now,’ she told his lordship. But he says as it’s his bridge, so he won’t. And he ain’t.”
“Oh, dear.” So much for romance. “Well, who’s the fourth arrival?”
“Lawyer. Name of Warin. Now he has been asking questions. Very worried about his young cousin, seemingly, as was last seen riding upriver.”
“Warin, Warin. He wrote the letter the boy carried.” It was as if an ice barrier was melting and allowing everything to flood back into her memory. Your affct cousin, Wlm Warin, gentleman-at-law, who hereby sends: two silvr marks as an earnest of your inheritance, the rest to be Claimed when we do meet.
Letters, always letters. A letter in the dead man’s saddlebag. A letter on Rosamund’s table. Did they connect the two murders? Not necessarily. People wrote letters when they could write at all. On the other hand ...
“When did Master Warin arrive seeking his cousin?”
“Late last night, afore the blizzard. And he’s a weeper. Crying fit to bust for worry as his cousin might’ve got caught in the snow, or been waylaid for his purse. Wanted to cross the bridge and ask at the village, but the snow started blowing, so he couldn’t.”
The Serpent's Tale Page 18
