On the rise above a gentle valley, a dog and four riders from Godstow reined in and considered the building and appurtenances crowning the opposite hill.
After some silence, Adelia said, unwisely, “How on earth do tradesmen penetrate it?”
“Gift of flowers and a nice smile used to do it in my day,” the bishop said.
She heard a snort from the two men on either side of her.
“I mean the labyrinth,” she said.
Rowley winked. “So do I.”
More snorts.
Oh, dear, sexual innuendo. Not that she could blame them. From here, the view of Wormhold Tower and what surrounded it looked, well, rude. A very high, thin tower capped by a close-fitting cupola-it even had a tiny walkway around its tip to accentuate the penile resemblance-rose from the ring of a labyrinth that men apparently saw as female pubic hair. It presented an outline that might have been scrawled on the top of its hill by a naughty, adolescent giant. A graffito against the skyline.
The bishop had led them here at a canter, afraid the weather might stop them, but now that the tower was in sight, anxiety had left him relieved and, obviously, with time to enjoy ribaldry.
Actually, it had been an easy journey northward, using the river towpath that ran from Godstow to within a half-mile of the tower. So easy, in fact, that Adelia had been invigorated by it and lost her own fear that the weather would hamper her return to her child.
Such bargemen as they’d encountered had warned them that more snow was on the way, but there was no sign of it. It was a cloudless day, and although the sun hadn’t melted the previous night’s fall, it had been impossible not to rejoice in a countryside like white washing spread out to dry against a laundered blue sky.
Farther south, on the river they’d just left, Mansur, the bishop’s two men-at-arms, and a couple of Godstow’s men were bringing up a barge on which to take the body of Rosamund back to the convent-once Bishop Rowley had retrieved it.
First, though, the labyrinth that surrounded the dead woman’s stronghold had to be got through-a prospect that was stimulating the old Adam in Adelia’s companions.
“I told you,” Rowley said, addressing Adelia but winking at Walt. “Didn’t I say it was the biggest chastity belt in Christendom?”
He was trying to provoke her. Ignore it. “I hadn’t thought it would be quite so large,” she said, and then sighed at herself. Another double entendre to make the men snigger.
Well, she hadn’t. The labyrinth at Saint Giorgio’s in Salerno was considered by the town to be a wonder, supposed to represent in length and complexity the soul’s journey through life. But this thing opposite her now was a colossus. It encircled the tower, forming a ring so thick that it took up a wide section of this side of the hill and disappeared behind it. Its outer wall was nine or ten feet high, while, at this distance, its interior seemed to be filled entirely by white wool.
The prioress of Godstow had warned her about it before she set out. “Blackthorn,” Sister Havis had told her with disgust. “Can you credit it? Walls of granite with blackthorn planted against them.”
What Adelia was looking at was stone and hedge, twisting and turning in frozen undulation.
Not a belt, Adelia thought. A snake, a huge, constricting serpent.
Walt said, “Reckon as that’s a bugger for its hedgers,” nearly causing Rowley to fall off his horse. Jacques was smiling broadly, happy at seeing his bishop unbend.
Sister Havis had said what Adelia could expect. The original labyrinth, she’d said, had been built round his keep by a mad Saxon necromancer and enlarged by his equally mad dispossessor, a Norman, one of the Conqueror’s knights, in order to stop his enemies from getting in and his women from getting out.
The Norman’s descendants had been dispossessed in their turn by Henry Plantagenet, who’d found it a convenient place in which to install his mistress, abutting, as it did, the forest of Woodstock, where he kept a hunting lodge.
“Architectural vulgarity,” Sister Havis had called it, angrily. “An object of male lewdness. Local people are in awe of it, even while they jeer at it. Poor Lady Rosamund. I fear the king found it amusing to put her there.”
“He would.” Adelia knew Henry Plantagenet’s sense of humor.
And Rowley’s.
“Of course I can penetrate it,” the bishop was saying now, in answer to a question from Jacques. “I’ve done it. A wiggle to the right, another to the left, and everybody’s happy.”
Listening to the laughter, Adelia began to be sorry for Rosamund. Had the woman minded living in a place that invited, almost demanded, salacious comment from every man who saw it?
Poor lady. Even dead, she was being shown little respect.
With snow resting on the walls and branches of the surrounding labyrinth, the tower looked to be rising from a mass of white fuzz. Adelia was irresistibly reminded of a patient, an elderly male whom her foster father was attending and on whose body he was instructing Adelia how to repair a hernia in the groin. Suddenly, much to his abashed surprise, the patient had sustained an erection.
That’s what’s scrawled against the sky, she thought, an old man’s last gasp.
She turned on Rowley. “How. Do. We. Get. In,” she said, clearly, “and try to remember there’s a dead woman in there.”
He jerked a thumb. “We ring the bell.”
Transfixed by the tower, she hadn’t noticed it, though it stood only a few yards away on the hillside, next to a horse trough.
Like everything else belonging to Wormhold, it was extraordinary, an eight-foot-high wooden trapezoid set into the ground, from which hung a bell as massive as any in a cathedral’s chimes.
“Go on, Jacques,” the bishop said. “Ding-dong.”
The messenger dismounted, walked up to the bell, and swung the rope hanging from its clapper.
Adelia clung to her mare as it skittered, and Walt snatched the reins of Jacques’s to prevent it from bolting. Birds erupted from the trees, a rookery fell to circling and cawing as the bell’s great baritone tolled across the valley. Even Ward, most unresponsive of mongrels, looked up and gave a bark.
The reverberations hung in the air and then settled into a silence.
Rowley swore. “Again,” he said. “Where’s Dakers? Is she deaf?”
“Must be,” Jacques said. “That would waken the dead.” He realized what he’d said. “Beg pardon, my lord.”
For a second time the great bell tolled, seeming to shake the earth. Again, nothing happened.
“Thought I saw someone,” Walt said, squinting against the sun.
So did Adelia-a black smudge on the tower’s walkway. But it had disappeared now.
“She’d answer to a bishop, should’ve worn my episcopal robes,” Rowley said. He was in hunting clothes. “Well, there’s nothing for it. We can find our own way through-I remember it perfectly.”
He set his horse down the hill to the valley, cloak flying. Less precipitately, the others followed.
The entrance in the labyrinth’s wall when they reached it sent the men off again. Instead of an arch, two stone ellipses met at top and bottom, forming a ten-foot cleft resembling the female vulva, the inference being emphasized by the stone-carved surround in the shape of snakes coiling into various fruits and out again.
It was difficult to get the horses to enter, though the cleft was big enough; they had to be blindfolded to step through, showing, in Adelia’s opinion, more decency than the remarks made by the men tugging at their reins.
Being inside wasn’t nice. The way ahead of them was fairly wide, but blackthorn covered it, shutting out the sun to enfold them in the dim, gray light of a tunnel and the smell of dead leaves.
The roof was too low to allow them to remount. They would have to walk the horses through.
“Come on.” Rowley was hurrying, leading his horse at a trot.
After a few bends, they could no longer hear birdsong. Then the way divided and they were presented with two tunnels, each as wide as the one by which they’d come, one going left, the other right.
“This way,” said the bishop. “We turn northeast toward the tower. Just keep a sense of direction.”
The first doubt entered Adelia’s mind. They shouldn’t have had to choose. “My lord, I’m not sure this is…”
But he’d gone ahead.
Well, he’d been here before. Perhaps he did remember. Adelia followed more slowly, her dog pattering after her, Jacques behind him. She heard Walt bringing up the rear, grumbling. “Wormhold. Good name for this snaky bugger.”
Wyrm hold. Of course. Wyrm. In marketplaces, the professional storytellers-that the English still called skalds-frightened their audience with tales of the great snake/dragon that squirmed its way through Saxon legends just as the mimicking tunnels coiled through this labyrinth.
Wistfully, Adelia remembered that Gyltha’s Ulf loved those stories and played at being the Saxon warrior-what was his name?-who’d killed one such monster.
I miss Ulf. I miss Allie. I don’t want to be in the Wyrm’s lair.
Ulf had described it to her with relish. “Horrible it was, deep in the earth and stunk with the blood of dead men.”
Well, they were spared that stench at least. But there was the smell of earth, and a sense of being underground, pressed in with no way out. Which is what the Daedalus who concocted this swine intended, she thought. It explained the blackthorn; without it, they could have climbed a wall, seen where they were heading, and breathed fresh air, but blackthorn had spines that, like the Wyrm, tore flesh to shreds.
It didn’t frighten her-she knew how to get out-but she noticed that the men with her weren’t laughing now.
The next bend turned south and opened into three more tunnels. Still unhesitating, Rowley took the alley to the right.
After the next bend, the way divided again. Adelia heard Rowley swear. She craned her neck to look past his horse for the cause.
It was a dead end. Rowley had his sword out and was stabbing it into a hedge that blocked the way. The scrape of metal on stone showed that there was a wall behind the foliage. “Goddamn the bastard. We’ll have to back out.” He raised his voice. “Back out, Walt.”
The tunnel wasn’t wide enough to turn the horses without scratching them on head and hindquarters, not only injuring them but also making them panic.
Adelia’s mare didn’t want to back out. It didn’t want to go on, either. Sensibly, it wanted to stand still.
Rowley had to squeeze past his own horse to take hers by the bridle in both hands and push until he persuaded the animal to retreat back to the cul-de-sac’s entrance, where they could reform their line.
“I told you we should keep going northeast,” he said to Adelia, as if she had chosen the route.
“Where is northeast?”
But, irritated, he’d set off again, and she had to try and drag her reluctant mare into a trot to keep him in sight.
Another tunnel. Another. They might have been wrapped in gray wool that was thickening around them. She’d lost all sense of direction now. So, she suspected, had Rowley.
In the next tunnel, she lost Rowley. She was at a division and couldn’t see which branch he’d taken. She looked back at Jacques. “Where’s he gone?” And, to the dog, “Where is he, Ward? Where’s he gone?”
The messenger’s face was grayish, and not just from the light straining through the roof; it looked older. “Are we going to get out, mistress?”
She said soothingly, “Of course we shall.” She knew how he felt. The thorned roof rounded them in captivity. They were moles without the mole’s means of rising to the surface.
Rowley’s voice came, muffled. “Where in hell are you?” It was impossible to locate him; the tunnels absorbed and diverted sound.
“Where are you?”
“In the name of God, stay still, I’m coming back.”
They kept shouting in order to guide him. He shouted in his turn, mostly oaths. He was swearing in the Arabic he’d learned on crusade-his choice language when he cursed. Sometimes his voice was so near it made them jump; then it would fade and become hollow, raving against labyrinths in general and this one in particular. Against Dame Dakers and her bloody serpent. Against Eve with her bloody serpent. Even, appallingly, after blackthorn tore his cloak, against Rosamund and her bloody mushrooms.
Ward cocked his ears this way and that, as if enjoying the tirade, which, his mistress thought, he probably was, being another male.
It’s women to be blamed, always women. He wouldn’t curse the man who built this horror, or the king who imprisoned Rosamund in the middle of it.
Then she thought, They’re frightened. Well, Walt may not be, but Rowley is. And Jacques definitely is.
At last a tall shape loomed out of the shadow ahead, leading a horse and coming toward her. It yelled, “What are you standing there for, woman? Get back. We should have taken the last turning.”
Again, it was her fault. Again, the mare wouldn’t move until the bishop took its bridle and pushed.
So that he shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the other two men, Adelia lowered her voice. “Rowley, this isn’t a labyrinth.”
He didn’t lower his. “No, it isn’t. We’re in the entrails of Grendel’s bloody mother, that’s what, goddamn her.”
It came to her. Beowulf. That was the name. Beowulf, Ulf’s favorite among all legendary Saxon warriors, killer of the Wyrm, slayer of the half-human monster Grendel and of Grendel’s awful avenging mother.
“Waste bitch, boundary walker,” Ulf had said of Grendel’s mother, meaning she prowled the edge between earth and hell in woman’s shape.
Adelia began to get cross. Why was it women who were to blame for everything-everything, from the Fall of Man to these blasted hedges?
“We are not in a labyrinth, my lord,” she said clearly.
“Where are we, then?”
“It’s a maze.”
“Same difference.” Puffing at the horse: “Get back, you great cow.”
“No, it isn’t. A labyrinth has only one path and you merely have to follow it. It’s a symbol of life or, rather, of life and death. Labyrinths twist and turn, but they have a beginning and an end, through darkness into light.”
Softening, and hoping that he would, too, she added, “Like Ariadne’s. Rather beautiful, really.”
“I don’t want mythology, mistress, beautiful or not, I want to get to that sodding tower. What’s a maze when it’s at home?”
“It’s a trick. A trick to confuse. To amaze.”
“And I suppose Mistress Clever-boots knows how to get us out?”
“I do, actually.” God’s rib, he was sneering at her, sneering. She’d a mind to stay where she was and let him sweat.
“Then in the name of Christ, do it.”
“Stop bellowing at me,” she yelled at him. “You’re bellowing.”
She saw his teeth grit in the pretense of a placatory smile; he always had good teeth. Still did. Between them, he said, “The Bishop of Saint Albans presents his compliments to Mistress Adelia and please to escort him out of this hag’s hole, for the love of God. How will you do it?”
“My business.” Be damned if she’d tell him. Women were defenseless enough without revealing their secrets. “I’ll have to take the lead.”
They were forced to back the horses to one of the junctions where there was just enough room to turn each animal round without damage, though not enough to allow one to pass another, so Adelia ended up leading Walt’s mount, Walt leading the messenger’s behind her, Jacques behind him with hers, Rowley bringing up the rear with his own.
The maneuver was achieved with resentment. Even Jacques, her ally, said, “How are you going to get us out, then, mistress?”
“I just can.” She paused. “Though it may take some time.”
She stumped along in front, holding Walt’s mount’s reins in her right hand. In the other was her riding crop, which she trailed with apparent casualness so that it brushed against the hedge on her left.
As she went, she chuntered to herself. Lord, how disregarded I am in this damned country. How disregarded all women are.
She was back to the reasoning that had made her refuse to marry Rowley. At the time, he’d been expecting the king to offer him a barony, not a bishopric, thus allowing him a wife. Mad for him though she was, acceptance would have meant slipping her wrists into metaphorical golden fetters and watching him lock them on. As his wife, she could never have been herself, a medica of Salerno.
Adelia possessed none of the requisite feminine arts: She couldn’t dance well, didn’t play the lute, had never touched an embroidery frame-her sewing restricted to cobbling back together those cadavers she had dissected. In Salerno, she had been allowed to pursue skills that suited her, but in England there had been no room for them; the Church condemned any woman who did not toe its line-for her own safety, she had been forced to practice as a doctor in secret, letting a man take the credit.
As Baron Rowley’s wife she would have been feted, complimented, bowed to, just as long as she denied her true being. And how long could she have done that? I am who I am.
Ironically, the lower down the social scale women were, the greater freedom they had; the wives of laborers and craftsmen could work alongside their men-even, sometimes, when they were widowed, take over their husband’s trade. Until she’d become Adelia’s friend and Allie’s nurse, Gyltha had conducted a thriving business in eels and had called no man her master.
Adelia trudged on. Hag’s hole. Grendel’s mother’s entrails. Why was this dreadful place feminine to the men lost in it? Because it was tunneled? Womb-like? Is this woman’s magic? The great womb?
Is that why the Church hates me, hates all women? Because we are the source of all true power? Of life?
She supposed that by leading them out of it, she was only confirming that a woman knew its secrets and they did not.
Great God, she thought, it isn’t a question of hatred. It’s fear. They are frightened of us.
And Adelia laughed quietly, sending a suggestion of sound reverberating backward along the tunnel, as if a small pebble was skipping on water, making each man start when it passed him.
“What in hell was that?”
Walt called back stolidly, “Reckon someone’s laughing at us, master.”
“Dear God.”
Still grinning, Adelia glanced over her shoulder to find Walt looking at her. His gaze was amused, friendlier than it had been. It was directed at her riding crop, still dragging along the left-hand hedge. He winked.
He knows, she thought. She winked back.
Heartened by this new ally, she nevertheless quickened her pace because, when she’d turned, she’d had to squint to make out Walt’s expression. His face was indistinct, as if seen through haze.
They were losing the light.
Surely it was still only afternoon outside, but the low winter sun was leaving this side of the labyrinth, whichever side it was, in shadow. She didn’t want to imagine what it would be like in blackness.
It was frightful enough anyway. Following the left-hand hedge wherever it went took them into blind alleys time and again so that they became weary with the travail of reversing increasingly restless horses. Each time, she could hear Rowley stamping. “Does the woman know what in hell she’s doing?”
She began to doubt it herself. There was one tormenting question: Are the hedges continuous? If there was a gap, if one part of this maze was separated from the rest, then they could wander until it suffocated them.
As the tunnels darkened, the shadows conglomerated into a disembodied face ahead of her, malignant, grinning, mouthing impossible things. You won’t get out. I’ve closed the clefts. You are sewn in.
You won’t see your baby again.
The thought made her hands sweat so that the riding crop slipped out of her grasp and, in clutching for it, she bumped into the hedge and set off a small avalanche of frozen snow onto her head and face.
It refreshed her common sense. Stop it, there’s no such thing as magic. She shut her eyes to the gargoyle and her ears to Rowley’s curses-the nudge had set off a shower all along the line-and pressed on.
Walt said, as if passing the time of day, bless him, “’Tis marvelous to me how they do keep this thorn in trim. Two cuts a year, I reckon. Needs a powerful number of men to do that, mistress. Takes a king to pay them sort of wages.”
She supposed it was marvelous in its way, and he was right, the maze would require a small army to look after it. “Not only cut it but sweep it,” she said. For there were no clippings on the paths. “I wouldn’t want my dog to get a thorn in his paw.”
Walt considered the animal pattering along behind Adelia, with which he had now been confined at close quarters for some time. “Special breed, is he? Never come across his like afore.” Nor, his sniff said, would he rush to do so again.
She shrugged. “I’ve got used to it. They’re bred for the stink. Prior Geoffrey of Cambridge gave me this one’s predecessor when I came to England so that I could be traced if I got lost. And then gave me another when the first one…died.”
Killed and mutilated when she’d tracked down the murderer of Cambridge children to a lair a thousand times more awful than this one. But the scent he’d left to be followed had saved her then, and both the prior and Rowley had ever since insisted that she be accompanied by just such another.
She and Walt continued to chat, their voices absorbing into the network of shrubbery enfolding them. Walt had stopped despising her; it appeared that he was on good terms with women. He had daughters, he told her, and a capable wife who managed their smallholding for him while he was away. “The which I be away a lot, now Bishop Rowley’s come. Chose me out of all the cathedral grooms to travel with un, so he did.”
“A good choice, too,” Adelia told him, and meant it now.
“Reckon ’twas. Others ain’t so partial to his lordship. Don’t like as he’s friend to King Henry, them being for poor Saint Thomas as was massacry-ed at Canterbury.”
“I see,” she said. She’d known it. Rowley, having been appointed by the king against their wishes, was facing hostility from the officers and servants of his own diocese.
Whether the blame heaped on Henry Plantagenet for the murder of Thomas à Becket on the steps of his own cathedral was justified, she had never been sure, even though, in his temper, the king had called for it while in another country. Had Henry, as he’d screamed for the archbishop’s death, been aware that some of his knights, with their own reasons for wanting Becket dead, would gallop off to see it done?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But if it hadn’t been for King Henry’s intervention, the followers of Saint Thomas would have condemned her to the whipping post-and nearly had.
She was on Henry’s side. The martyred archbishop had seen no difference between the entities of Church and of God. Both were infallible. The laws of both must be obeyed without question and without alteration as they always had been. Henry, for all his faults the more human man, had wanted changes that would benefit not the Church but his people. Becket had obstructed him at every turn, and was still obstructing him from the grave.
“Me and Oswald and Master Paton and young Jacques, we was all new to our jobs, see,” Walt was saying. “We didn’t have no grumble with Bishop Rowley, not like the old guard, as was cross with him for being a king’s man. Master Paton and Jacques, they joined selfsame day as he was installed.”
So with the great divide between king and martyr running through the diocese of Saint Albans, its new bishop had chosen servants as fresh to their roles as he was to his.
Good for you, Rowley. Judging by Walt and Jacques, you’ve done well.
The messenger, however, was proving less imperturbable than the groom. “Should we shout for help, my lord?” Adelia heard him ask Rowley.
For once, his bishop was gentle with him. “Not long now, my son. We’re nearly out.”
He couldn’t know it, but, in fact, they were. Adelia had just seen proof that they were, though she was afraid the bishop would receive little satisfaction from it.
Walt grunted. He’d seen what she’d seen-ahead in the tunnel was a pile of rounded balls of manure.
“That un dropped that as we was coming in,” Walt said quietly, nodding toward the horse Adelia was leading; it had been his own, the last in line when they entered the maze. The four of them would soon be out-but exactly where they had started.
“It was always an even chance.” Adelia sighed. “Bugger.”
The two men behind hadn’t heard the exchange, nor, by the time the hooves of the front two horses had flattened them in passing, did just another lot of equine droppings have any significance for them.
Another bend in the tunnel. Light. An opening.
Dreading the outburst that must follow, Adelia and her horse stepped through the cleft leading out of the Wyrm’s maze to be met by clean, scentless cold air and a setting sun illuminating the view of a great bell hanging from a trapezoid set in a hill they had descended more than two hours before.
One by one, the others emerged. There was silence.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Adelia shouted into it. She faced Rowley. “Don’t you see, if a maze is continuous, if there aren’t any breaks, and if all the hedges are connected to each other and you follow one of them and stick rigidly to it wherever it goes, you’ll traverse it eventually, you must, it’s inevitable, only…” Her voice diminished into a misery. “I chose the left-hand hedge. It was the wrong one.”
More silence. In the dying light, crows flapped joyously over the elm tops, their calls mocking the earthbound idiots below.
“Forgive me,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said politely. “Do I understand that if we’d followed the right-hand hedge, we could have eventually reached the destination we wanted in the first bloody place?”
“Yes.”
“The right-hand hedge?” the bishop persisted.
“Well…obviously, to go back it would be on the left-hand again… Are you taking us back in?”
“Yes,” the bishop said.
Lord, Lord, he’s taking us back in. We’ll be here all night. I wonder if Allie’s all right.
They rang the great bell again, in case the figure they’d seen on the tower’s walkway had relented, but, by the time they’d watered the horses at the trough, it was obvious that he or she had not.
Nobody spoke as loins were girded and a lantern lit. It was going to be very dark in there.
Rowley swept his cap off his head and knelt. “Be with us, Lord, for the sake of Thy dear Son.”
Thus, the four reentered the maze. Knowing that it had an end made their minds easier, though the cost of constantly twisting and turning and backing out of the blind alleys was higher now that they were tiring.
“How’d you learn of mazes, mistress?” Walt wanted to know.
“My foster father. He’s traveled extensively in the East, where he saw some, though not as big.”
“Proper old Wyrm, this, i’n it? Reckon there’s a way through as we’m not seeing.”
Adelia agreed with him. To be girded to this extent from the outside world would be an intolerable inconvenience; there had to be a straighter route. She suspected that some of the blind ends that appeared to be stone and hedge walls were not lined by masonry at all; they were gates with blackthorn trained over them that could open and shut on a direct path.
No good to her and the others, though. Investigating each one to see if it were movable would take too long and would result only in having to make further choices of tunnels that ended in fixtures.
They were condemned to the long way through.
They made it in silence. Even Walt stopped talking.
Nighttime brought the maze to life. The long-dead trickster who had designed it still tried to frighten them, but they knew him now. Nevertheless, the place had its own means of instilling dread; lantern light lit a thick tube of laced branches as if the men and the woman in it were struggling through an interminable gray stocking infested by creatures that, unseen, rustled out their dry existence in its web.
By the time they emerged, it was too dark to see whether the cleft they stepped through was ornamented like the entrance. They’d lost interest, anyway; amusement had left them.
The tunnels had to some extent protected them from the bitter air that assailed them now. Apart from an owl that, disturbed by their coming, took off from a wall with a slow clap of wings, there was no sound from the tower that faced them across the bailey. It was more massive than it had appeared from a distance, rising sheer and high toward a sky where stars twinkled icily down on it like scattered diamonds.
Jacques produced another lantern and fresh candles from his saddlebag and led them toward a blacker shape in the shadows at the tower’s base that indicated the steps to a door.
Nobody had crossed the bailey since the snow fell; nothing human, anyway-there were animal and bird prints aplenty. But the place was an obstacle course. Snowy bumps proved to be abandoned goods: a broken chair, pieces of cloth, a barrel with its staves crushed on one side, battered pans, a ladle. The snow covered a scene of chaos.
Walt, stumbling, revealed a bucket with a dead hen inside. The corpse of a dog, frozen in the act of snarling, lay at the end of its chain.
Rowley gave the bucket a kick that dislodged the hen’s carcass. “The disloyal, thieving bastards.”
Was that what this was?
It had been said that when William the Norman died, his servants immediately stripped their king’s body and ran off with such of his possessions as they could carry, leaving his knights to find the great and terrible Conqueror’s corpse naked on the floor of an empty palace room.
Had Rosamund’s servants done the same the moment their mistress was dead? Rowley called it disloyalty, but Adelia remembered what she’d thought of Rosamund’s neglect of Bertha; loyalty could come only of exchange and mutual regard.
The door to the tower, when the four reached it, was of thick, black oak at the top of a flight of wickedly glistening steps. There was no knocker. They hammered on it but neither dead nor living answered them. The sound echoed as if into an empty cave.
Keeping together-nobody suggested separating-they filed around the tower’s base, through arched entrances to courtyards, to where another door proved as immovable as the first. It was, at least, on ground level.
“We’ll ram the swine.”
First, though, the horses had to be cared for. A path led to a deserted stable yard containing a well that responded with the sound of a splash when Walt dropped a stone down it, allaying his fear that its depths would prove frozen. The stalls had straw in them, if somewhat dirty, and their mangers had been replenished with oats not long before their former occupants had been stolen.
“Reckon as it’ll do for now,” Walt said grudgingly.
The others left him chipping ice from the well’s windlass.
The pillagers had been arbitrary and hurried. An otherwise deserted byre held a cow that had resisted theft by being in the act of delivering its calf. Both were dead, the calf still in its birth sac.
Dodging under a washing line on which hung sheets as stiff as metal, they explored the kitchen buildings. The scullery had been stripped of its sink, the kitchen of everything except a massive table too heavy to lift.
Trying the barn, they found indentations in its earth floor to show where a plow and harrow had once stood. And…
“What’s this, my lord?”
Jacques was holding up his lantern to a large contraption in a corner by a woodpile.
It was metal. A flanged footplate formed the base of two upright struts attached to it by heavy springs. Both sets of struts ended in a row of triangular iron teeth, shaped to fit into the corresponding row of the other’s.
The men paused.
Walt rejoined them, to stare. “Seen ’em as’ll take your leg,” he said slowly. “Never like this un, though.”
“Neither have I,” Rowley told him. “God be merciful, somebody’s actually oiled it.”
“What is it?” Adelia asked.
Without answering, Rowley went up to the contraption and grasped one set of its teeth. Walt took the other and, between them, they pulled the two sets of struts’ rows apart until each lay flat on the ground opposite the other, teeth gaping upward. “All right, Walt. Careful now.” Rowley bent and, keeping his body well away, extended an arm to fumble underneath the mechanism. “Works by a trigger,” he said. Walt nodded.
“What is it?” Adelia asked again.
Rowley stood up and picked up a log from the woodpile. He gestured for Adelia to keep her dog away. “Imagine it lying in long grass. Or under snow.”
Almost flat, as the thing was now, it would be undetectable.
It’s a mantrap. Oh, God help us.
She bent and grasped Ward’s collar.
Rowley chucked the log onto the contraption’s metal plate.
The thing leaped upward like a snapping shark. The teeth met. The clang seemed to come later.
After a moment, Walt said, “Get you round the whatsis, that would, begging your pardon, mistress. No point in gettin’ you out, either.”
“The lady didn’t care for poachers, it seems,” the bishop said. “Damned if I go wandering her woods.” He dusted his hands. “Come on, now. This won’t beat the Bulgars, as my old granddad used to say. We need a ram.”
Adelia stayed where she was, staring at the mantrap. At two and a half feet high, the teeth would engage around the average man’s groin, spiking him through. As Walt had said, releasing the victim would make no difference to an agonizing and prolonged death.
The thing was still vibrating, as if it were licking its chops.
The bishop had to come back for her.
“Somebody made it,” she said. “Somebody oiled it. For use.”
“I know. Come along, now.”
“This is an awful place, Rowley.”
“I know.”
Jacques found a sawing horse in one of the outhouses. Holding it sideways by its legs and running with it, he and Walt managed to break down the tower’s back door at the third attempt.
It was nearly as cold inside as out. And more silent.
They were in a round hall that, because of the tower’s greater base, was larger than any room they were likely to find upstairs. Not a place for valued visitors to wait; it was more a guardroom. A couple of beautiful watchman’s chairs, too heavy to be looted, were its saving grace. For the rest, hard benches and empty weapon racks made up the furniture. Cressets had been torn from the walls, a chandelier from its chain.
Some tapers clipped into their holders were strewn among the rushes of the floor. Lighting them from the lantern, Rowley, Adelia, and Walt took one each and began the ascent of the bare staircase running upward around the wall.
They found the tower to be one circular room placed on another, like a tube of apothecary’s pills wrapped in stiff paper and set upright, the door to each reached by a curving flight and a tiny landing. The second they came to was as utilitarian as the first, its empty racks, some dropped strands of polishing horsetail, and the smell of beeswax suggesting an overlarge cleaning cupboard.
Above that, the maids’ room: four wooden beds and little else. All the beds were stripped of palliasse and covering.
Each room was deserted. Each was marginally less uncomfortable than the one below. A sewing room-looted, for the most part, but the bench tables set under each arrow slit to catch the light carried torn strips of material and an errant pincushion. A plaster dummy had been smashed to the floor, and shards of it were seemingly kicked onto the landing.
“They hated her,” said Adelia, peering in through the arched doorway.
“Who?”
“The servants.”
“Hated who?” The bishop was beginning to puff.
“Rosamund,” Adelia told him. “Or Dame Dakers.”
“With these stairs? I don’t blame ’em.”
She grinned at his laboring back. “You’ve been eating too many episcopal dinners.”
“As you say, mistress.” He was unoffended. It was a rebuff; in the old days, he’d have been indignant.
I must remember, she thought. We are no longer intimate; we keep our distance.
The fourth room-or was it the fifth?-had not been looted, though it was starker than any. A truckle bed, its gray, knitted bedspread rigidly tucked in. A deal table on which stood ewer and basin. A stool. A plain chest with a few bits of women’s clothing, equally plain and neatly folded.
“Dakers’s room,” Adelia said. She was beginning to get the feel of the housekeeper, and was daunted by it.
“Nobody’s here. Leave it.”
But Adelia was interested. Here, the looters had desisted. Here, she was sure, Dragon Dakers had stood on the stairs, as frightening as Bertha described her, and stopped them from going farther.
Rosamund’s escutcheon was carved into the eastern section of the west wall above Dakers’s bed; it had been painted and gilded so that it dominated the gray room. Raising her candle to look at it, Adelia heard an intake of breath from Rowley in the doorway that wasn’t due to exertion.
“God’s teeth,” he said, “that’s madness.”
A carved outer shield showed three leopards and the fleur-de-lis, which every man and woman in England now recognized as the arms of their Angevin Plantagenet king. Inside it was a smaller shield, checkered, with one quarter containing a serpent, the other a rose.
Even Adelia’s scanty knowledge of heraldry was enough to know that she was looking at the escutcheon of a man and his wife.
The bishop, staring, joined her. “Henry. In the name of God, Henry, what were you doing to allow this? It’s madness.”
A motto had been carved into the wall beneath the escutcheon. Like most armorial mottos, it was a pun. Rosa Mundi.
Rose of all the world.
“Oh, dear,” Adelia said.
“Jesus have mercy,” Rowley breathed. “If the queen saw this…”
Together, motto and escutcheon made the taunt of all taunts: He prefers me to you. I am his wife in all but name, the true queen of his heart.
The bishop’s mind was leaping ahead. “Damnation. Whether Eleanor’s seen it or not is irrelevant. It’s enough for others to assume that she knows of it and had Rosamund killed because of it. It’s a reason to kill. It’s flaunting usurpation.”
“It’s a bit of stone with patterns on it put up by a silly woman,” Adelia protested. “Does it matter so much?”
Apparently, it did-and would. Pride mattered to a queen. Her enemies knew it; so did the enemies of the king.
“I’ll kill the bitch if she isn’t dead already,” said the man of God. “I’ll burn the place down, and her in it. This is an invitation to war.”
She was puzzled. “You’ve been here before, I’d expect you to have seen it already.”
He shook his head. “We met in the garden; she was taking the air. We gave thanks to God for her recovery, and then Dakers led me back through the Wyrm. Where is Dakers?”
He pushed past Jacques and Walt, who stood blinking in the doorway, and attacked the stairs, shouting for the housekeeper. Doors slammed open as he looked into the next room, dismissed it, and raced upward to the next.
They hurried after him, the tower resounding with the crash of boots and the click of a dog’s paws on stone.
Now they were climbing past Rosamund’s apartments. Dakers, if it was Dakers, had been able to preserve them in all their glory. Adelia, trying to keep up, was vouchsafed glimpses of spring and autumn come together. Persian carpets, Venetian goblets, damask divans, gold-rich icons and triptychs, arras, statuary: the spoils of an empire laid at the feet of an emperor’s mistress.
Here were glazed windows, not the arrow slits of the rooms below. They were shuttered, but the taper’s light as Adelia passed reflected an image of itself in lattices of beautiful and expensive glass.
And through the open doors came perfume, subtle but strong enough to delight a nose deadened by cold and the foul pelt of a dog.
Adelia sniffed. Roses. He even captured roses for her.
Above her, another door was flung against its jamb. A sharp exclamation from the bishop.
“What is it, what is it?” She reached him on the last landing; there were no more stairs. Rowley was standing facing the open door, but the lit candle in his hand was down by his side, dripping wax onto the floor.
“What is it?”
“You were wrong,” Rowley said.
The cold up here was extraordinary.
“Was I?”
“She’s alive. Rosamund. Alive after all.”
The relief would have been immeasurable if it hadn’t been that he was so strange and there was no light in the room he was facing.
Also, he was making no effort to enter.
“She’s sitting there,” he said, and made the sign of the cross.
Adelia went in, the dog following her.
No perfume here, the cold obliterated scent. Each window-at least eight of them encircled the room-was open, its glazed lattice and accompanying shutter pushed outward to allow in air icy enough to kill. Adelia felt her face shrivel from it.
Ward went ahead. She could hear him sniffing round the room, giving no sign that he encountered anybody. She went in a little farther.
The glow of the taper fell on a bed against the northerly wall. Exquisite white lace swept from a gilded rondel in the ceiling to part over pillows and fall at either side of a gold-tasseled coverlet. It was a high and magnificent bed, with a tiny ivory set of steps placed so that its owner might be assisted to reach it.
Nobody was in it.
Its owner was sitting at a writing table opposite, facing a window, a pen in her hand.
Adelia, her taper now vibrating a little, saw the glancing facets of a jeweled crown and ash-blond hair curling from it down the writer’s back.
Go nearer. You have to. It can’t harm you. It can’t.
She willed herself forward. As she passed the bed, she stepped on a fold of its lace lying on the floor, and the ice in it crunched under her boot.
“Lady Rosamund?” It seemed polite to say it, even knowing what she knew.
She took off her glove to touch the figure’s unexpectedly large shoulder and felt the chill of stone in what had once been flesh. She saw a white, white hand, its wrist braceleted with skin, like a baby’s. Thumb and forefinger were supporting a goose quill as if it had only seconds ago drawn the signature on the document on which they rested.
Sighing, Adelia bent to look into the face. Open, blue eyes were slightly cast downward so that they appeared to be rereading what the hand had just written.
But Fair Rosamund was very dead.
And very fat.