Dakers,” Adelia said. “Dakers did this.”
Only Dame Dakers could be refusing to let her dead mistress go to her grave.
Rowley was recovering. “We’ll never get her in the coffin like that. For the love of God, do something. I’m not rowing back to Godstow with her sitting up and looking at me.”
“Show some respect, blast you.” Banging the last window closed, Adelia turned on him. “You won’t be rowing, and she won’t be sitting.”
Both were compensating in their own way for the impact of a scene that had unmanned him and unnerved her.
Jacques was staring from the doorway, but Walt, having peered in, had retired downstairs in a hurry. Ward, unperturbed, was scratching himself.
Used to dead bodies as she was, Adelia had never feared one-until now. Consequently, she’d become angry. It was the corpse’s employment.…Rosamund hadn’t died in that position-if it werethe mushrooms that had killed her, the end would have been too violent. No, Dakers had dragged the still-warm carcass onto the Roman chair, arranged it, and then either waited for rigor mortis to set in or, if rigor had already passed, held it in place until the cold coming through the open windows had fixed head, trunk, and limbs as they were now, frozen in the attitude of writing.
Adelia knew this as surely as if she’d seen it happen, but the impression that the dead woman had got up, walked to her table, sat down, and picked up a pen could not be shaken off.
Rowley’s peevishness merely disguised the revulsion that had thrown him off balance, and Adelia, who felt the same, responded to it with irritation. “You didn’t tell me she was fat.”
“Is it relevant?”
No, it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, but it was a sort of aftershock. The image Adelia had gained of Fair Rosamund by repute, from meeting Bertha, from tramping through the dreadful maze, from seeing the even more dreadful mantrap, had been of a beautiful woman with the indifference to human suffering of an Olympian goddess: physically lovely, pampered, aloof, cold as a reptile-but slim. Definitely slim.
Instead, the face she’d bent down to peer into had looked back at her with the innocent chubbiness integral to the obese.
It altered things. She wasn’t sure why, but it did.
“How long has she been dead?” Rowley demanded.
“What?” Adelia’s mind had wandered into inconsequential questioning of the corpse. Why, with your weight, did you live at the top of this tower? How did you get down the stairs to meet Rowley in the garden?
How did you get back up?
“I said, how long has she been dead?”
“Oh.” It was time to collect her wits and do the job she’d been brought here to do. “Impossible to be exact.”
“Was it the mushrooms?”
“How can I tell? Probably yes.”
“Can you flatten her?”
God’s rib, he was a crude man. “She’ll flatten herself,” Adelia said, shortly, “just get some heat into this damned room.” Then she asked, “Why did Dakers want her to be seen writing, do you suppose?”
But the bishop was on the landing, shouting to Walt to bring braziers, kindling, firewood, candles, pushing Jacques into descending and helping the groom, then going down himself on another search for the housekeeper, taking energy with him and leaving the chamber to the quiet of the dead.
Adelia’s thoughts rested wistfully on the man whose calm assistance and reassurance had always been her rock during difficult investigations-for never was one likely to be more difficult than this. Mansur, however, was on the barge bringing Rosamund’s coffin upriver and, even supposing he had arrived at the landing place that served Wormhold Tower a quarter of a mile away, he, Oswald, and the men with them had been told to stay there until the messenger fetched them.
Which could not be tonight. Nobody was going to face the maze of the Wyrm again tonight.
She had only one light; Rowley had taken his taper with him. She put hers on the writing table as near to the corpse’s hand as possible without burning it-a minuscule start to the thawing out of the body that not only would take time but would be messy.
Adelia brought to mind the pigs on which she had studied decomposition at the farm in the hills above Salerno, kept for the purpose by Gordinus, her teacher of the process of mortification. From the various carcasses, her memory went to those frozen in the icehouse he’d had built deep into rock. She calculated weights, times; she envisaged needles of ice crystals solidifying muscle and tissue…and the resultant juices as they melted.
Poor Rosamund. She would be exposed to the outrages of corruption when everything in her chamber spoke of a being who’d loved elegance.
Poor Dakers, who had, undoubtedly, loved her mistress to the point of madness.
Who had also put a crown on her mistress’s head. A real crown, not a fashionable circlet, not a chaplet, not a coronal, but an ancient thing of thick gold with four prongs that rose in the shape of fleur-de-lis from a jeweled brim-the crown of a royal consort. This, Dakers was saying, is a queen.
Yet the same hand had brushed the lovely hair so that it hung untrammeled over the corpse’s shoulders and down its back in the style of a virgin.
Oh, get to it, Adelia told herself. She was not here to be fascinated by the unplumbable depths of human obsession but to find out why someone had found it good that this woman should die and, thereby, who that someone was.
She wished there was some noise from downstairs to ameliorate the deathly quiet of this room. Perhaps it was too high up for sound to reach it.
Adelia turned her attention to the writing table, an eerie business with the shuttered glass on the other side of it acting on it like the silvering of a looking glass, so that she and the corpse were reflected darkly.
A pretty table, highly polished. Near the dead woman’s left hand, as if her fingers could dip into it easily, was a bowl of candied plums.
The bowl was a black-and-red pot figured with athletes like the one her foster father had found in Greece, so ancient and precious that he allowed no one to touch it but himself. Rosamund kept sweetmeats in hers.
A glass inkwell encased in gold filigree. A smart leather holder for quills, and a little ivory-and-steel knife to sharpen them. Two pages of the best vellum, both closely written, lying side by side, one under the right hand. A sand shaker, also glass, in gold filigree matching the inkwell, its sand nearly used up. A tiny burner for melting the wax that lay by it in two red sticks, one shorter than the other.
Adelia looked for a seal and found none, but there was a great gold ring on one of the dead fingers. She picked up the taper and held it close to the ring. Its round face was a matrix that when pressed into softened wax would embed the two letters RR.
Rosamund Regina?
Hmm.
It had mattered to Dakers that Rosamund be recognized as literate-no mean accomplishment in England, even among high-born women. Why else had she been petrified like this? Obviously, she had been literate. The table’s implements showed heavy use; Rosamund had written a lot.
Was Dakers merely proud that you could write? Or is there some other significance that I’m not seeing?
Adelia turned her attention to the two pieces of vellum. She picked up the one directly in front of the corpse-and found it indecipherable in this light; Rosamund’s literacy had not extended to good calligraphy-here was a cramped scrawl.
She wondered where Rowley was with more candles, blast him. It was taking the bishop a long time to return. For just a second, Adelia registered the fact, then found that by extending the parchment above her head with one hand, putting the taper dangerously close underneath it with the other, and squinting, it was just possible to make out a superscription. What she held was a letter.
“To the Lady Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine and supposed Queen of England, greetings from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.”
Adelia’s jaw dropped. So, very nearly, did the letter. This wasn’t lèse-majesté, it was outright, combative treason. It was a challenge.
It was stupid.
“Were you insane?” The whisper was absorbed by the room’s silence.
Rosamund was sending a challenge to Eleanor’s authority, and must have known it was one the queen would have to respond to or be forever humiliated.
“You were taking a risk,” Adelia whispered. Wormhold Tower might be difficult to seize, but it wasn’t impregnable; it couldn’t withstand the sort of force that an infuriated queen would send against it.
The deadness of the corpse whispered back, Ah, but instead did the queen send an old woman with poisoned mushrooms?
None of the above, Adelia thought to herself, because Eleanor didn’t receive the letter. Most likely, Rosamund had never intended to send it; isolated in this awful tower, she’d merely amused herself by scribbling fantasies of queenship onto vellum.
What else had she written?
Adelia replaced the letter on the table and picked up its companion document. In the dimness, she made out another superscription. Another letter, then. Again, it had to be held up so that the taper shone upward onto it. This one was easier to read.
“To the Lady Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine and supposed Queen of England, greetings from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.”
The wording was exactly the same. And it was more decipherable only because somebody else had written it. This hand was very different from Rosamund’s scrawl; it was the legible, sloping calligraphy of a scholar.
Rosamund had copied her letter from this one.
Ward gave a low growl, but Adelia, caught up in the mystery, paid him no attention.
It’s here. I am on the brink of it.
Waving the parchment gently, she thought it out, then saw in the mirror of the window that she was, in fact, tapping Rosamund’s head with it.
And stopped, she and the corpse each as rigid as the other. Ward had tried to warn her that someone else had entered the tower room; she’d paid no notice.
Three faces were reflected in the glass, two of them surmounted by crowns. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, my dear,” one of them said-and it wasn’t talking to Adelia.
Who, for a moment, stood where she was, staring straight ahead, trying to subdue shivering superstition, gathering all her common sense against belief in the wizardry of conjurement.
Then she turned and bowed. There was no mistaking a real queen.
Eleanor took no notice of her. She walked to one side of the table, bringing with her a scent that subsumed Rosamund’s roses in something heavier and more Eastern. Two white, long-fingered hands were placed on the wood as she bent forward to look into the face of the dead woman. “Tut, tut. You have let yourself go.” A beringed forefinger nudged the Greek pot. “Do I suspect too many sweeties and not enough sallets?”
Her voice belled charmingly across the chamber. “Did you know that poor Rosamund was fat, Lord Montignard? Why was I not told?”
“Cows usually are, lady.” A man’s voice, coming from a shape lounging in the doorway and holding a lantern. There was an indistinct, taller figure in mail standing behind him.
“So rude,” said Eleanor, apologetically, to the body in the chair. “Men are unfair, are they not? And you must have had so many compensating qualities…generosity with your favors, things like that.”
The cruelty was not only verbal but also accentuated by the two women’s physical disparity. Against the tall sweep of the queen’s shape, that showed slender even in the fur wrapping it round, Rosamund appeared lumpen, her tumbling hair ridiculous for a mature woman. Compared to the delicate spikes on the white-gold crown Eleanor wore, Rosamund’s was an overweight piece of grandiloquence.
The queen had come to the document. “My dear, another of your letters to me? And God froze you to ice in the middle of penning it?”
Adelia opened her mouth and then shut it; she and the men in the doorway were merely sounding boards in the game that Eleanor of Aquitaine was playing with a dead woman.
“I am sorry I was not here at the time,” the queen was saying. “I had but landed from France when I received word of your illness, and there were other matters I had to see to rather than be at your deathbed.” She appeared to sigh. “Always business before pleasure.”
She picked up the letter and held it at arm’s length, unable to read it in the light but not needing to. “Is this like the others?
Greetings to the supposed queen from the true one? Somewhat repetitious, don’t you think? Not worth keeping, yes?”
She crumpled the parchment and tossed it onto the floor, grinding it out on the stones with the twist of an excellent boot.
Slowly, slowly, Adelia bent slightly sideways and down. She slipped the document she’d been holding into the top of her right boot and felt her dog lick her hand as she did it. He was keeping close.
Facing the mirroring window, she looked to see if the man in the doorway had noticed the movement. He hadn’t. His attention was on Eleanor; Eleanor’s on Rosamund’s corpse.
The queen was cupping her ear as if listening to a reply. “You don’t mind? So generous, but they say you were always generous with your favors. Oh, and forgive me, this bauble is mine.” Eleanor had lifted the crown off the dead woman’s head. “It was made for the wives of the counts of Anjou two centuries ago, and how dare he give it to a stinking great whore like you…”
Control had gone. With a scream, the queen sent the crown spinning away toward the window opposite them both as if she meant to smash the glass with it. Ward barked.
What saved Eleanor’s life was that the crown hit the window with the padded underside of its brim. If the glass had shattered, Adelia-dazedly watching the mirroring window shake as the missile bounced off it-would not have seen the reflection of Death slithering toward them. Nor the knife in its hand.
She didn’t have time to turn round. It was coming for Eleanor. Instinctively, Adelia flung herself sideways, and her left hand contacted Death’s shoulder.
In trying to deflect the knife, she misjudged and had her right palm sliced open by it. But her shove changed the momentum of the attacker, who went tumbling to the floor.
The scene petrified: Rosamund sitting unconcernedly in her chair; Eleanor, just as still, facing the window in which the attack had been reflected; Adelia standing and looking down at the figure lying sprawled facedown at her feet. It was hissing.
The dog approached it, sniffing, and then backed away.
So for a second. Then Lord Montignard was exclaiming over the queen while the mailed man had his boot on the attacker’s back and a sword raised in his two hands, looking at Eleanor for permission to strike.
“No.” Adelia thought she’d shrieked it, but shock diminished the word so that it sounded quietly reasonable.
The man paid her no attention. Expressionless, he went on looking at the queen, who had a hand to her head. She seemed to collapse, but it was to kneel. The white hands were steepled, the crowned head bowed, and Eleanor of Aquitaine prayed. “Almighty God,” she said, “accept the thanks of this unworthy queen for stretching out Your hand and reducing this, my enemy, to a block of ice. Even in death she did send her creature against me, but You turned the blade so that, innocent and wronged as I am, I live on to serve You, my Lord and Redeemer.”
When Montignard helped her to her feet, she was amazingly calm. “I saw it,” she said to Adelia. “I saw God choose you as his instrument to save me. Are you the housekeeper? They say this strumpet had a housekeeper.”
“No. My name is Adelia. I am Adelia Aguilar. I assume that is the housekeeper. Her name is Dakers.” Pointing to the figure on the floor, her hand dripped blood over it.
Queen Eleanor paid it no attention. “What do you do here, then, girl? How long have you lived here?”
“I don’t. I’m a stranger to this place. We arrived an hour or so ago.” A lifetime. “I’ve never been here before. I had only just come up the stairs and discovered…this.”
“Was this creature with you?” Eleanor dabbled her fingers in the direction of her still-supine attacker.
“No. I hadn’t seen her, not until now. She must have hidden herself when she heard us come up the stairs.”
Montignard came close to wave the tip of a dagger in her face. “You wretch, it is your queen you talk to. Show respect or I slit your nose.” He was a willowy young man, very curly, very brave now.
“My lady,” Adelia added dully.
“Stop it, Monty,” the queen snapped, and turned to the man in mail. “Is the place secured, Schwyz?”
“Secure?” Still without expression, Schwyz managed to convey his opinion that the tower was about as secure as a slice of carrot. “We took four men in the barge and three downstairs.” He didn’t address the queen by her title, either, but Adelia noticed that Montignard didn’t threaten to slit Schwyz’s nose for it; the man stood square on thick legs, more like a foot soldier than a knight, and nobody was in any doubt that if Eleanor had given the nod, he’d have skewered the housekeeper like a flapping fish. And Montignard, for that matter.
A mercenary, Adelia decided.
“Did these three men downstairs bring you with them?” the queen asked.
“Yes.” Dear Lord, she was tired. “My lady,” she added.
“Why?”
“Because the Bishop of Saint Albans asked me to accompany him.” Rowley could answer the questions; he was good at that.
“Rowley?” The queen’s voice had altered. “Rowley’s here?” She turned to Schwyz. “Why was I not told?”
“Four men in the boat and three downstairs,” Schwyz repeated stolidly. His accent was London with a trace of something more foreign. “If a bishop is among them, I don’t know it.” He didn’t care, either. “We stay the night here?”
“Until the Young King and the Abbot of Eynsham arrive.”
Schwyz shrugged.
Eleanor cocked her head at Adelia. “And why has his lordship of Saint Albans brought one of his women to Wormhold Tower?”
“I can’t say.” At that moment, she didn’t have the energy to recount the train of events, and certainly not to make them comprehensible. She was too tired, too shocked, too struck down by horrors even to refute the imputation of being “one of his women,” though not to wonder how many he was known to have.
“We shall ask him,” Eleanor said brightly. She looked down at the writhing shape on the floor. “Raise her.”
The courtier Montignard pushed forward and made a fuss of kicking the would-be assassin’s knife across the floor. Hauling her upright from under Schwyz’s boot, he maintained her with one arm round the chest and put the point of his dagger to her neck with the other.
It was Death, a better facsimile than any in the marketplace mystery plays. The hood of a black cloak had wrinkled back to disclose the prominent cheekbones and teeth of a skull with pale skin so tight that the only indication, in this bad light, to show that the face had any at all was a large and sprouting mole on the upper lip. The eyes were set deep; they might have been holes. All it lacked was the scythe.
It was still hissing sporadically, the words mixed with spittle. “…dare to touch the true queen, you dissembler…my Master, my most northerly Lord…burn your soul…cast you…utmost obscenity.”
Eleanor leaned forward, cupping her ear again, then stood back. “Demons? Belial?” She turned to her audience. “The woman threaten me with Belial. My dear, I married him.”
“Only let me strangle her, lady. Let me cauterize this pus,” Montignard said. A pearl of blood appeared from where the tip of the dagger pierced the woman’s skin.
“Leave her alone,” Adelia managed a shout now. “She’s mad, and she’s half dead already, leave her alone.” Instinctively, she’d put her fingers round the woman’s wrist, feeling a hideously slow pulse among bones almost as cold as Rosamund’s. Dear God, how long had she been hiding in this ice chamber?
“She needs warmth,” Adelia said to Eleanor. “We must warm her.”
The queen looked at Adelia’s dripping hand held out to her in appeal, then at the housekeeper. She shrugged. “We are informed the creature needs warming, Monty. I imagine that does not entail putting it into the fire. Take it downstairs, Schwyz, and see to it. Gently, now. We shall question it later.”
Scowling, the courtier handed his captive over to Schwyz, who took her to the door, gave an order to one of his men, saw her taken away, and came back. “Madam, we should leave. I cannot defend this place.”
“Not yet, Master Schwyz. Go about your duties.”
Schwyz stumped off, not a happy man.
The queen smiled at Adelia. “You see? You ask for the woman’s life, I give it. Noblesse oblige. Such a gracious monarch am I.”
She was impressive; Adelia gave her that. The prickling weakness of shock that threatened to collapse Adelia’s legs left this woman seemingly untouched, as if attempted assassination was the everyday round of royalty. Perhaps it was.
Montignard hesitated. He nodded toward Adelia. “Leave you alone with this wench, lady? I shall not. Does she wish you harm? I do not know.”
“My lord.” Eleanor had a metaphorical whip in her boot. “Whoever she may be, she saved my life. Which”-the whip cracked-“you were too slow to do. Now go attend to that eyesore. Also, we could profit from some warmth ourselves. See to it. And bring me the Bishop of Saint Albans.”
Self-preservation helped Adelia to mumble, “And some brandy. Send up brandy.” She’d just properly seen the wound in her hand; it went deep and, goddamn all assassins, she needed her right hand.
The queen nodded her permission. She showed no sign of leaving the chamber and descending to another. While Adelia considered that perverse, not to say unhallowed, considering the poor body occupying it, she was grateful to be spared the stairs. Sidling out of the royal sight, she sank down onto the floor by the side of the bed and stayed there.
People came and went, things were done, the bed stripped and its covers and mattress sent downstairs to be burned-the queen was insistent about that.
A beautiful young woman, presumably one of Eleanor’s attendants, came in, fluttered at the sight of Rosamund, fainted prettily, and had to be taken out again. Maids, manservants-how many had she brought with her?-carried in braziers, candles enough to light the Vatican, incense and oil burners, lamps, flambeaux. Adelia, who’d thought she’d never be warm again, began to think kindly and soporifically of the cold. She closed her eyes…
“…in hell are you doing here? If he’s coming, he’ll come straight for this tower.” It was Rowley’s voice, very loud, very angry.
Adelia woke up. She was still on the floor by the bed. The chamber was hotter; there were more people in it. Rosamund’s body, ignored, sat at its table, though some merciful soul had covered the head and shoulders with a cloak.
“You dare address my glorious lady like that? She goes where she please.” This was Montignard.
“I’m talking to the queen, you bastard. Keep your snout out of…it.” He jerked the last word-somebody had punched him.
Peering under the bed, Adelia saw the bottom half of the queen and all of Rowley kneeling in front of her. His hands were tied. Mailed legs-she recognized one pair as Schwyz’s-stood behind him and, to the side, Montignard’s fine leather boots, one of them raised for another kick.
“Leave him, my lord,” Eleanor said icily. “This is the language I have come to expect from the Bishop of Saint Albans.”
“It’s called truth, lady,” Rowley said. “When did you ever hear anything else from me?”
“Is it? Then the question is not what I do here, but what you do.”
It’ll come in a minute, Adelia thought. The appalling coincidence of this forgathering must seem sinister to a queen who’d just been attacked.
Cautiously, she began undoing the strings of the purse hanging from her belt and feeling for the small roll of velvet containing the surgical instruments she always carried when traveling.
“I told you. I came on your behalf.” Rowley jerked his head in the direction of the writing table. “My lady, rumor is already blaming you for Rosamund’s death…”
“Me? Almighty God killed her.”
“He had help. Let me find out whose-it’s why I came, to find out…”
“In the dark? This night of nights?” Montignard interrupting again. “You come and same time a demon rush out of the wall to stab the queen?”
Here it was. Adelia’s hand found the tiny, lethally sharp knife in the roll and loosened it so that its handle protruded. What to do with it she wasn’t sure, but if they hurt him…
“What? What demon?” Rowley asked.
Eleanor nodded. “The housekeeper, Dampers. Did you hire her to kill me, Saint Albans?”
“Elean-oor.” It was the protesting growl of one old friend to another; everybody else in the chamber was diminished by the claim of a hundred shared memories. It made the queen go back in her tracks.
“Well, well,” she said, more gently, “I suppose you must be absolved, since it was your leman who pushed aside the blade.”
Adelia’s hand relaxed.
“My leman?”
“I forgot you have so many. The one with the foreign name and no manners.”
“Ah,” the bishop said. “That leman. Where is she?”
Using her one good hand, Adelia pulled herself up by the bed frame and stood where everybody could see her. She felt afraid and rather foolish.
Awkwardly, Rowley looked round. He had blood on his mouth.
Their eyes met.
“I rejoice that she served such a mighty purpose, madam,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said slowly. He looked back at the queen. “Keep her if you will, she’s of no use to me-as you say, she has no manners.”
Eleanor shook her head at Adelia. “See how easily he discards you? All men are knaves, king or bishop.”
Adelia began to panic. He’s abandoning me to her. He can’t. There’s Allie. I must get back to Godstow.
Rowley was answering another question. “Yes, I have. Twice. The first time I came was when she was taken ill-Wormhold is part of my diocese; it was my duty. And tonight when I heard of her death. That’s not the point…” Being bound and on hisknees wasn’t going to stop the bishop from lecturing the queen. “In the name of God, Eleanor, why didn’t you make for Aquitaine? It’s madness for you to be here. Get away. I beg you.”
“‘That’s not the point’?” Eleanor had heard only what was important to her. Her cloak swished across the floor as she retrieved Rosamund’s letter from it. “This is the point. This, this. I have received ten such.” She smoothed the letter out and held it out. “You and the whore were in league with Henry to set her up as queen.”
There was a moment’s quiet as Rowley read.
“God strike me, I knew nothing of it,” he said-and Adelia thought that even Eleanor must hear that he was appalled. “Nor does the king, I swear. The woman was insane.”
“Evil. She was evil. She shall burn in this world as in the next-her and all that is hers. The brushwood is being put in place, ready for the flame. A fitting end for a harlot. No Christian burial for her.”
“Jesus.” Adelia saw Rowley blanch and then gather himself. Suddenly, the tone of his voice changed to one that was wrenchingly familiar; it had got her into his bed. “Eleanor,” he said gently, “you are the greatest of queens, you brought beauty and courtesy and music and refinement to a realm of savages, you civilized us.”
“Did I?” Very soft, all at once girlish.
“You know you did. Who taught us chivalry toward women? Who in hell taught me to say please?” He followed up the advantage of her laugh. “Do not, I beg you, commit an act of vandalism that will resound against you. No need to burn this tower; let it stand in its filth. Retire to Aquitaine, just for a while, give me time to find out who actually killed Rosamund so that I can treat with the king. For the sake of Christ crucified, lady, until then don’t antagonize him.”
It was the wrong note.
“Antagonize him?” Eleanor said sweetly. “He had me imprisoned at Chinon, Bishop. Nor did I hear your voice amongst those raised against it.”
She signaled to the men behind Rowley, and they began dragging him out.
As they reached the doorway, she said clearly, “You are Henry Plantagenet’s man, Saint Albans. Always were, always will be.”
“And yours, lady,” he shouted back. “And God’s.”
They heard him swearing at his captors bumping him down the stairs. The sound became fainter. There was a silence like the dust-settling quiet that comes after a building has crashed to the ground.
Schwyz had stayed behind. “The schweinhund is right that we should leave, lady.”
The queen ignored him; she was circling, agitated, muttering to herself. Shrugging resignation, Schwyz went away.
“He’d never hurt you, lady,” Adelia said. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Don’t love him,” the queen snapped back.
I don’t, I won’t. Just don’t hurt him.
“Let me take out his eyes, my queen.” Montignard was breathing hard. “He would assassinate you with that demon.”
“Of course he wouldn’t,” Eleanor said-and Adelia let out a breath of relief. “Rowley told the truth. That woman, Dampers…I had inquiries made, and it is well known she was mad for her mistress, ugh. Even now, she would kill me ten times over.”
“Really?” Montignard was intrigued. “They were Sapphos?”
The queen continued to circle. “Am I a killer of whores, Monty? What can they accuse me of next?”
The courtier bent and picked up the hem of her cloak to kiss it. “You are the blessed Angel of Peace come to Bethlehem again.”
It made her smile. “Well, well, we can do nothing more until the Young King and the abbot arrive.” From downstairs came the sound of furniture being overturned and the slamming of shutters. “What is Schwyz doing down there?”
“He puts archers at each window ready to defend. He is afraid the king will come.”
The queen shook her head indulgently, as if at overenthusiastic children. “Even Henry can’t travel fast through in this weather. God kept the snow off for me, now he sends it to impede the king. Well then, I shall stay here in this chamber until my son comes.” She looked toward Adelia. “You too, yes?”
“Madam, with your permission I shall join the-”
“No, no. God has sent you to me as a talisman.” Eleanor smiled quite beautifully. “You will stay here with me and”-she walked over to the body and snatched off its covering cloak-“together we shall watch Fair Rosamund rot.”
So they did.
What Adelia remembered of that night afterward were the hour-long silences when she and the queen were alone-apart from Montignard, who fell asleep-and during which Eleanor of Aquitaine sat, untiring, her back straight as a plumb line, eyes directed at the body of the woman her husband had loved.
She also remembered, though with disbelief, that at one point a young courtier with a lute came in and strolled about the chamber, singing winsomely in the langue d’oc, and that, after receiving no response from his queen and even less from the corpse, he wandered out again.
And the heat. Adelia remembered the heat of the braziers and a hundred candle flames. At one point, she begged for relief. “May we not open a window for a minute, madam?” It was like being in a pottery kiln.
“No.”
So Adelia, the lucky charm, privileged by her status as God-sent savior to royalty, sat in its presence, crouching on the floor with her cloak under her while the queen, still in her furs, sat and watched a corpse.
Eleanor’s eyes left it only when they brought the brandy, and Adelia, instead of drinking the spirit, tipped it over the cut in her hand and took a needle and silk thread from the traveling pack of instruments in her pocket.
“Who taught you to cleanse with brandy?” Eleanor wanted to know. “I use twice-distilled Bordeaux myself… Oh, here, Ishall do it.”
Tutting at Adelia’s attempt to stitch the wound together with her left hand, she took the needle and thread and did it instead, putting in seven ligatures where Adelia herself would have used only five, thus making a neater, if more painful, job of it. “We who went on Crusade had to learn to treat the wounded, there were so many,” she said briskly.
Most of them caused by the ineptitude of the King of France, its leader, according to Rowley, after his own, much later, time in the Holy Land.
Not that the Church had condemned Louis for it, preferring instead to dwell on the scandal Eleanor, then his queen, had caused by insisting on going with him and taking with her a train of similarly adventurous females.
“Born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, that lady,” Rowley had said of her, not without admiration. “Her and her Amazons. And an affair with Uncle Raymond of Toulouse when she arrived in Antioch. What a woman.”
Something of that daring remained; her very presence here showed as much, but time, thought Adelia, had twisted it into desperation.
“Is that…urgh.” Adelia wished to be brave, but the queen was plying the needle with more skill than gentleness. “Was that where you learned…how to thread a maze? In the…oofff…East?” For there was no sign that Eleanor had spent as much time blundering around Wormhold’s hedges as she and the others had.
“My lady,” insisted the queen.
“My lady.”
“It was, yes. The Saracen is skilled in such devices, as in so much else. I have no doubt your bishop also learned the trick of it from the East. Rowley went there on my orders…a long time ago.” Her voice had softened. “He took the sword of my dead little son to Jerusalem and laid it on Christ’s own altar.”
Adelia was comforted; the bond between Eleanor and Rowley made by that vicarious crusade went deep. It might be stretched to its limit in present circumstances, but it still held. The queen had taken him prisoner; she wouldn’t allow him to be killed.
She’s a mother, Adelia thought. She’ll let me go back to my baby. There would be an opportunity to ask for that when she and the queen were better acquainted. In the meantime, she still had to learn all she could about Rosamund’s murder. Eleanor hadn’t ordered it. Who had?
Taper light had been kinder to the queen than the blazing illumination around them now. Elegance was there and always would be, so was the lovely, pale skin that went with auburn hair, now hidden, but wrinkles were puckering at her mouth and the tight, gauze wimple around her face did not quite hide the beginning of sagging flesh under the chin. Slender, yes, fine bones, yes. Yet there was another sag above the point where a jeweled belt encircled her hips.
No wonder, either. Two daughters by her first husband, Louis of France, and, since their divorce, eight more children from her marriage to Henry Plantagenet, five of them sons.
Ten babies. Adelia thought of what carrying Allie had done to her own waistline. She’s a marvel to look as she does.
There wouldn’t be any more, though; even if king and queen had not been estranged, Eleanor must now be, what, fifty years old?
And Henry probably not yet forty.
“There,” the queen said, and bit through the needle end of the silk now holding Adelia’s palm together. Producing an effusion of lace that served her as a handkerchief, she bound it efficiently round Adelia’s hand and tied it with a last, painful tug.
“I am grateful, my lady,” Adelia said in earnest.
But Eleanor had returned to her watch, her eyes on the corpse.
Why? Adelia wondered. Why this profane vigil? It’s beneath you.
The woman had escaped from a castle in the Loire Valley, had traveled through her husband’s hostile territory gathering followers and soldiers as she went, had crossed the Channel and slipped into southern England. All this to get to an isolated tower in Oxfordshire. And in winter. True, most of the journey had obviously been made before the roads became as impassable as they now were-to arrive at the tower, she must have been camped not far away. Nevertheless, it was a titanic journey that had tired out everybody but Eleanor herself. For what? To gloat over her rival?
But, Adelia thought, the enemy is vanquished, petrified into a winter version of Sodom and Gomorrah’s block of salt. An assassination has been thwarted by me and an Eleanor-preserving God. Rosamund turns out to have been fat. All this is sufficient, surely, to satisfy any lust for revenge.
But not the queen’s, obviously; she must sit here and enjoy the vanquished one’s decomposition. Why?
It wasn’t because she’d envied the younger mistress the ability to still bear children. Rosamund hadn’t had any.
Nor was it as if Rosamund had been the only royal paramour. Henry swived more women than most men had hot dinners. “Literally, a father to his people,” Rowley had said of him once, with pride.
It was what kings did, almost an obligation, a duty-in Henry’s case, a pleasure-to his realm’s fertility.
To make the damn crops grow, Adelia thought sourly.
Yet Eleanor’s own ducal ancestors themselves had encouraged the growth of acres of Aquitanian crops in their time; she’d been brought up not to expect marital fidelity. Indeed, when she’d had it, wedded to the praying, monkish King Louis, she’d been so bored she’d petitioned for divorce.
And hadn’t she obliged Henry by taking one of his bastards into her household and rearing him? Young Geoffrey, born of a London prostitute, was proving devoted and useful to his father; Rowley had a greater regard for him than for any of the king’s four remaining legitimate sons.
Rosamund, only Rosamund, had inspired a hatred that raised the heat of this awful room, as if Eleanor’s body was pumping it across the chamber so that the flesh of the woman opposite would putrefy quicker.
Was it that Rosamund had lasted longer than the others, that the king had shown her more favor, a deeper love?
No, Adelia said to herself. It was the letters. Menopausal as Eleanor was, she’d believed their message: Another woman was being groomed to take her place; in both love and status, she was being overthrown.
If it had been Eleanor who’d poisoned Rosamund, it was tit for tat. In her own way, Rosamund had poisoned Eleanor.
Yet Rowley had been right: This queen hadn’t murdered anybody.
There was no proof of it, of course. Nothing that would absolve her. The killing had been plotted at long range; people would say she had ordered it while she was still in France. There was nothing to scotch the rumor-apart from Eleanor’s own word.
But it wasn’t her style. Rowley had said so, and Adelia now agreed with him. If Eleanor had engineered it, she would have wanted to be present when it happened. This curiously naïve, horrible overseeing of her rival’s disintegration was to compensate her for not having been there to enjoy the last throes.
But damn it, I don’t have to witness it with you. All at once, Adelia was overwhelmed by the obscenity of the situation. She was tired, and her hand stung like fire; she wanted her child. Allie would be missing her.
She stood up. “Lady, it is not healthy for you to be here. Let us go downstairs.”
The queen looked past her.
“Then I will,” Adelia said.
She walked to the door, skirting Montignard, who was snoring on the floor. Two spears clashed as they crossed, blocking the doorway in front of her; the first man-at-arms had been reinforced by another.
“Let me by,” she said.
“You want to piss, use a pot,” one of the men said, grinning.
Adelia returned to Eleanor. “I am not your subject, lady. My king is William of Sicily.”
The queen’s eyes remained on Rosamund.
Adelia gritted her teeth, fighting desperation. This is not the way. If I’m to see Allie again, I must be calm, make this woman trust me.
After a while, followed by her dog, Adelia began circling the chamber, not looking for a way out-there was none-but using this trapped time to find out where Dakers had hidden herself.
It couldn’t have been under the bed or Ward would have sniffed her out; he didn’t have the finest nose in the world, it being somewhat overwhelmed by his own scent, but he wouldn’t have missed that.
Apart from the bed, the room contained a prie-dieu, smaller than the one in the bishop’s room at Saint Albans but as richly carved. Three enormous chests were stuffed with clothes.
A small table held a tray that had been brought in for the queen’s supper: a chicken, veal pie, a cheese, a loaf-somewhat mildewed-dried figs, a jug of ale, and a stoppered bottle of wine. Eleanor hadn’t touched it. Adelia, who’d last eaten at the nunnery, sliced heavily into the chicken and gave some to Ward. She drank the ale to satisfy her thirst and took a glass of wine with her to sip as she explored.
An aumbry contained pretty bottles and phials with labels: Rose oyl. Swete violet. Rasberrie vinigar for to whiten teeth. Oyle of walnut to smooth the hands. Nearly all were similarly cosmetic, though Adelia noted that Rosamund had suffered from breathing problems-I’m not surprised, with your weight-and had taken elecampane for it.
The bed took up more of the center of the room than was necessary by standing a foot or so out from the wall. Behind it was a tapestry depicting the Garden of Eden-obviously a favorite subject, because there was another, a better one, on the same theme on the easterly wall between two of the windows.
Going closer, so that she stood between the bed and the hanging, Adelia felt a blessed coolness.
The tapestry was old and heavy; the considerable draft emerging from underneath it did not cause it to shift. Where in the one on the other wall Adam and Eve sported in joyful movement, here cruder needlework stood them opposite each other amid unlikely trees, as frozen as poor Rosamund herself. The only depiction of liveliness was in the coiling green toils of the serpent-and even that was moth-eaten.
Adelia went closer; the chill increased.
There was a small gap in the canvas where the snake’s eye should have been-and it wasn’t the moth that had caused it. It had been deliberately made; there was buttonhole stitching round its edges.
A spy hole.
She had to exert some strength to push the hanging aside. Icy air came rushing out at her, and a stale smell. What she saw was a tiny room, corbeled into the tower’s wall. Rosamund hadn’t had to use chamber pots; hers was the luxury of a garderobe. Set into a curved bench of polished wood was a bottom-shaped, velvet-lined hole over a drop to the ground some hundred feet below. Soap in the shape of a rose lay in a holder next to a little golden ewer. A bowl within hand’s reach contained substantial wipes of lamb’s wool.
Good for Rosamund. Adelia approved of garderobes, as long as the pit beneath them was dug out regularly; they saved maidservants having to go up and downstairs carrying, and often slopping, noisome containers.
She was not so enamored of the mural painted on the plastered walls; its eroticism being more suited to a bordello than to a privy, but perhaps Rosamund had enjoyed looking at it while she sat there, and undoubtedly Henry Plantagenet would have. Although, come to think of it, had even he been aware of the existence of the garderobe and its spy hole?
Adelia moved behind the tapestry so that she could apply her eye to the hole-and found that she could see right down the bed to the writing desk and the window beyond.
Here, then, was where Dakers had concealed herself and-unpleasant thought-had watched her, Adelia, at her investigations. What patience and what stamina to endure the cold; only fury inspired at seeing Eleanor snatch the crown off her mistress’s head had impelled her out of it.
But the careful stitching around the peephole indicated that tonight wasn’t the only time somebody had employed their time looking through it.
It would have been invited guests who’d ventured up to this floor-it was an English custom for the higher classes to entertain in their bedrooms. If Dakers had spied on them, she would have to have taken up position in the garderobe-with Rosamund’s permission and knowledge.
To watch the guests? The king? The bed and its activities?
Speculation opened an avenue that Adelia did not want to explore, still less the relationship between mistress and housekeeper.
To hell with the queen’s permission; she needed to breathe clean air. She slid herself out from under the hanging. Eleanor appeared not to have noticed. Adelia went to the nearest window, lifted the lattices’ catch, pulled it inward, and pushed the shutters open. Kicking a footstool into position, she stood on it and leaned out.
The bitter night sky crackled with stars. Peering downward to the ground, she saw scattered watch fires with armed men moving around them.
Oh, God, if they’re putting brushwood around the tower’s base…if a breeze comes up and blows a spark from one of the fires…
She and Eleanor were at the top of a chimney.
That was enough fresh air. Shivering, not merely from the cold, Adelia closed the shutters. In doing so, she put too much weight on one side of the footstool and returned to the floor in a noisy scramble.
Glancing at the queen, expecting a rebuke, she wondered if Eleanor was in a trance; the queen’s eyes had not shifted from Rosamund. From his position on the floor, Montignard kicked out, muttered, and then continued to snore.
Adelia bent down to replace the footstool and saw that its marquetry top had come adrift, revealing that it was, in fact, the lid of a box on legs. There were documents inside. She scooped them out and returned to her former place on the floor at the other side of the bed to read them.
Letters again, half a dozen or more, all of them addressed to Eleanor, all purporting to have been written by Rosamund, yet in the same hand as the one Adelia had put into her boot.
Each had the same jeering superscription and, in this light, she was able to read what followed; it was not always the same in every letter, but the inherent message was repeated over and over.
“Today did my lord king sport with me and tell me of his adoration…” “My lord king has this moment left my bed…” “He speaks of his divorce from you with longing…” “…the Pope will look kindly on divorce on the grounds of your treachery to my lord king in that you do inflame his sons against him.” “…the arrangements for my coronation at Winchester and Rouen.” “…my lord king will announce to the English who is their true queen.”
Poison in ink, drip, drip.
And the writer had penned them for Rosamund to duplicate in her own hand. He or she-more likely he-had even attached notes for her instruction.
“Be more legible, for the queen did scoff at your lettering and call you ignoramus.”
“Write quickly that this may reach the queen on her anniversary as she does set much store by that date and will be the more affected.”
“Hurry, for my messenger must come to Chinon, where the queen is kept, before the king moves her elsewhere.”
And most telling of all: “We win, lady. You shall be queen before summer comes again.”
At no point did the instructor name himself. But, thought Adelia, he was someone who’d been near enough to Eleanor to know that she had ridiculed Rosamund’s writing.
And a fool. If his hope was to engineer a divorce between Henry and Eleanor and set Rosamund up as queen, he was lacking the most fundamental political sense. Henry would never divorce Eleanor. For one thing, even if wifely treason was grounds for divorce-and Adelia didn’t think it was-Henry had caused too much offense to the Church over the death of Becket and had suffered for it; he dare not offend again. For another, he had a regard for the order of things. Even more important to him was the fact that by losing Eleanor, he would lose her great Duchy of Aquitaine, and Henry, though a beast, was a beast that never gave up land.
In any case, the easygoing English might wink at their king’s mistress, but not a mistress imposed on them as queen; it would be an insult.
I know that, and I’m a foreigner.
And yet these letters had been good enough to inspire a stupid, ambitious woman to copy and send them, good enough to inflame a queen into escaping and urging war by her sons against their father.
Rowley could be right; the person who had written these things had done so to create war.
There was a loud sniff from the other side of the room. Eleanor spoke in triumph. “She is going. She has begun to stink.”
That was quicker than expected. Surprised, Adelia looked up to where Rosamund was still stiffly inclined over her work.
She looked round further and saw that, in search of comfort, Ward had settled himself on the trailing end of the queen’s ermine cloak. “I’m afraid that’s merely my dog,” she said.
“Merely? Get him off. What does he do here?”
One of the men-at-arms who’d been nodding in the doorway roused himself and came in to deposit Ward on the landing outside, then, at a nod from his queen, returned to his post.
Eleanor shifted; she’d become restive. “Saint Eulalie grant me patience. How long will this take?” The vigil was becoming tiresome.
Adelia nearly said, “A while yet,” and then didn’t. Until she knew more about the situation, she had better stay in the role of a woman whom the queen accepted as a somewhat soiled part of Rowley’s baggage train but who’d nevertheless been chosen by God to save the royal life and was being kept close to the royal side as a reward.
But you should know more about me, Adelia thought, irritated. I am dying with curiosity; so should you be. You should know more about everything: how Rosamund died, why she wrote the letters, who dictated them…you should have had the room searched and found these exemplars before I did. It’s not enough to be a queen; you should ask questions. Your husband does.
Henry Plantagenet was a ferret and an employer of ferrets. He’d nosed out Adelia’s profession in a second and penned her up in England, like one of the rarer animals in his menagerie, until he found a use for her. He knew exactly how things stood between her and his bishop; he’d known when their baby was born-and its sex, which was more than the child’s father had known. A few days afterward, to prove that he knew, a royal messenger in plain clothes had delivered a gloriously lacy christening gown to Adelia’s fenland door with a note: “Call her what you will, she shall always be Rowley-Powley to me.”
Compared to the king, Eleanor walked within a circle of vision encompassing only her personal welfare and the certainty that God was most closely concerned with it. The questions she’d asked in this chamber had related solely to herself.
Adelia wondered whether she should enlighten her. Rowley and the queen must have corresponded in the past; she would know his writing. Showing her these documents would at least prove that he hadn’t written them for Rosamund to copy. She might even recognize the penmanship and know who had.
Wait, though. There were two crimes here.
If Mansur or her foster father had been watching Adelia at that moment, they would have seen her adopt what they called her “dissecting face,” the mouth tightened into a line, eyes furious with concentration, as they always were when her knife followed the link of muscle to sinew, pursued a vein, probed, and cut effect in order to find cause.
What made her a brilliant anatomist, Dr. Gershom had once told her, was instinct. She’d been offended. “Logic and training, Father.” He’d smiled. “Man provided logic and training, maybe, but the Lord gave you instinct, and you should bless him for it.”
Two crimes.
One, Rosamund had copied inflammatory letters. Two, Rosamund had been murdered.
Discovering whom it was who had urged Rosamund to write her letters was one thing. Discovering her murderer was another. And both solutions were contradictory, as far as Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Bishop of Saint Albans were concerned.
For the queen, the letter writer would be the villain and must be eliminated. Eleanor didn’t give a damn who’d killed Rosamund-would, if she learned who it was, probably reward him.
But for Rowley, the murderer was endangering the peace of the kingdom and must be eliminated. And his claim was the greater, because murder was the more terrible crime.
It would be better, at this stage, to give Rowley open ground for his investigation rather than complicating it by allowing the queen to pursue hers.
Hmm.
Adelia gathered up the documents on her lap, put them back in the footstool box, and replaced its lid. She would do nothing about them until she could consult Rowley.
Eleanor continued to fidget. “Has this benighted tower no place of easement?”
Adelia ushered her toward the garderobe.
“Light.” The queen held out her hand for a candle, and Adelia put one into it-reluctantly. She would see the naughty paintings.
If Adelia could have been any sorrier for the woman, it was then. When you came down to it, Eleanor was consumed by sexual jealousy as raging as that of any fishwife catching her husband in flagrante, and was being stabbed by reminders of it at every turn.
Adelia tensed herself for a storm, but when the queen emerged from under the hanging she looked tired and old, and was silent.
“You should rest, madam,” Adelia said, concerned. “Let us go down…”
There was noise from the stairs, and the two guards in the doorway uncrossed their spears and stood at attention.
A great hill of a man entered, sparkling with energy and frost and dwarfing Schwyz, who followed him in. He was enormous; kneeling to kiss the queen’s hand only put his head on a level with hers.
“If I’d been here, my dear, ’twouldn’t have happened,” he said, still kneeling. He pressed Eleanor’s hand to his neck with both of his, closing his eyes and rocking with the comfort of it.
“I know.” She smiled fondly at him. “My dear, dear abbot. You’d have put your big body in the way of the knife, wouldn’t you?”
“And gone rejoicing to Paradise.” He sighed and stood up, looking down at her. “You going to burn ’em both?”
The queen shook her head. “I have been persuaded that Dampers is mad. We will not execute the insane.”
“Who? Oh, Dakers. She’s mad, sure enough, I told you she was. Let the flame have her, I say. And her bloody mistress with her. Where is the whore?”
He strode across the room to the table and poked the corpse’s shoulder. “Like they said, cold as a witch’s tit. Bit of fire’d warm they both up, get ’em ready for hell.” He turned to wag his finger at Eleanor. “I’m a simple Gloucestershire man, as you know, and, Sweet Mary save me, a sinner, too, but I love my God, and I love my queen with all my soul, and I’m for putting their enemies to the torch.” He spat on Rosamund’s hair. “That’s the Abbot of Eynsham’s opinion of you, madam.”
The visitor had caused Montignard to stand up. He was busily and jealously-and uselessly-trying to gain the queen’s attention by urging her to eat. Eynsham, a man built more for tossing bales of hay than for shepherding monastic sheep, dominated the room, taking the breath out of it with the power of his body and voice, filling it with West Country earthiness and accent.
Bucolic he might have been, but everything he wore was of expensive and exquisite clerical taste, though the pectoral cross that had swung from his neck as he bent to the queen was overdone-a chunk of dull gold that could have battered a door in.
He’d taken years off Eleanor; she was loving it. Apart from the egregious Montignard, her courtiers had been too weary from traveling to make much fuss over her escape from death.
Or my part in it, Adelia thought, suddenly sour. Her hand was hurting.
“Bad news, though, my glory,” the abbot said.
Eleanor’s face changed. “It’s Young Henry. Where is he?”
“Oh, he’s right enough. But the chase was snappin’ at our heels all the way from Chinon, so the Young King, well, he decides to make for Paris ’stead of yere.”
Suddenly blind, the queen fumbled for the arm of her chair and sank into it.
“Now, now, it’s not as bad as that,” the abbot said, his voice deep, “but you know your lad, he never did take to England-said the wine was piss.”
“What are we to do? What are we to do?” Eleanor’s eyes were wide and pleading. “The cause is lost. Almighty God, what are we to do now?”
“There, there.” The abbot knelt beside her, taking her hands in his. “Nothing’s lost. And Schwyz here, we’ve been speaking together, and he reckons it’s all to the good. Don’t ee, Schwyz?”
At his urging, Schwyz nodded.
“See? And Schwyz do know what he’s about. Not much to look at, I grant, but a fine tactician. For here’s the good news.” Eleanor’s hands were lifted and hammered against her knees. “You hear me, my glory? Listen to me. Hear what our commander Jesus have done for us-He’ve brought the King of France onto our side. Joined un to Young Henry, yes he has.”
Eleanor’s head came up. “He has? Oh, at last. God be praised.”
“King Louis as ever is. He’ll bring his army into the field to fight alongside the son against the father.”
“God be praised,” Eleanor said again. “Now we have an army.”
The abbot nodded his great head as if watching a child open a present. “A saintly king. Weedy husband he was to you, I’ll grant, but we ain’t marrying him, and God’ll look kindly on his valor now.” He hammered Eleanor’s knees again. “D’you see, woman? Young Henry and Louis’ll raise their banner in France, we’ll raise ours here in England, and together we’ll squeeze Old Henry into submission. Light will prevail against Dark. Twixt us, we’ll net the old eagle and bring un down.”
He was forcing life into Eleanor; her color had come back. “Yes,” she said, “yes. A pronged attack. But have we the men? Here in England, I mean? Schwyz has so few with him.”
“Wolvercote, my beauty. Lord Wolvercote’s camped at Oxford awaiting us with a force a thousand strong.”
“Wolvercote,” repeated Eleanor. “Yes, of course.” Despondency began to leave her as she climbed the ladder of hope the abbot held for her.
“Of course of course. A thousand men. And with you at their head, another ten thousand to join us. All them as the Plantagenet has trampled and beggered, they’ll come flocking from the Midlands. Then we march, and oh what joy in Heaven.”
“Got to get to fuck Oxford first,” Schwyz said, “and quick, for fuck’s sake. It’s going to snow, and we’ll be stuck in this fuck tower like fuck Aunt Sallies. At Woodstock, I told the stupid bitch it couldn’t be defended. Let’s go straight to Oxford, I said. I can defend you there. But she knew better.” His voice rose from basso to falsetto. “Oh, no, Schwyz, the roads are too bad for pursuit, Henry can’t follow us here.” The tone reverted. “Henry fuck can, I know the bastard.”
In a way, it was the strangest moment of the night. Eleanor’s expression, something between doubt and exaltation, didn’t change. Still kneeling by her side, the abbot did not turn round.
Didn’t they hear him?
Did I?
For Adelia had been taken back to the lower Alps of the Graubünden, to which, every year, she and her foster parents had made the long but beautiful journey in order to avoid the heat of a Salerno summer. There, in a villa lent to them by the Bishop of Chur, a grateful patient of Dr. Gershom’s, little Adelia had gone picking herbs and wildflowers with the goatherd’s flaxen-haired children, listening to their chat and that of the adults-all of them unaware that little Adelia could absorb languages like blotting paper.
A strange language it had been, a guttural mixture of Latin and the dialect of the Germanic tribes from which those alpine people were descended.
She’d just heard it again.
Schwyz had spoken in Romansh.
Without looking round, the abbot was giving the queen a loose translation. “Schwyz is saying as how, with your favor on our sleeve, this is a war we’ll win. When he do speak from his heart, he reverts to his own patter, but old Schwyz is your man to his soul.”
“I know he is.” Eleanor smiled at Schwyz. Schwyz nodded back.
“Only he can smell snow, he says, and wants to be at Oxford. An’ I’ll be happier in my bowels to have Wolvercote’s men around us. Can ee manage the journey, sweeting? Not too tired? Then let you go down to the kitchens with Monty and get some hot grub inside ee. It’ll be a cold going.”
“My dear, dear abbot,” Eleanor said fondly, rising, “how we needed your presence. You help us to remember God’s plain goodness; you bring with you the scent of fields and all natural things. You bring us courage.”
“I hope I do, my dear. I hope I do.” As the queen and Montignard disappeared down the stairs, he turned and looked at Adelia, who knew, without knowing how she knew, that he had been aware of her all along. “Who’s this, then?”
Schwyz said, “Some drab of Saint Albans’s. He brought her with him. She was in the room when the madwoman attacked Nelly and managed to trip her up. Nelly thinks she saved her life.” He shrugged. “Maybe she did.”
“Did she now?” Two strides brought the abbot close to Adelia. A surprisingly well-manicured hand went under her chin to tip her head back. “A queen owes you her life, does she, girl?”
Adelia kept her face blank, as blank as the abbot’s, staring into it.
“Lucky, then, aren’t you?” he said.
He took his hand away and turned to leave. “Come on, my lad, let us get this festa stultorum on its way.”
“What about her?” Schywz jerked a thumb toward the writing table.
“Leave her to burn.”
“And her?” The thumb indicated Adelia.
The abbot’s shrug suggested that Adelia could leave or burn as she pleased.
She was left alone in the room. Ward, seeing his chance, came back in and directed his nose at the tray with its unfinished veal pie.
Adelia was listening to Rowley’s voice in her mind. “Civil war…Stephen and Matilda will be nothing to it…the Horsemen of the Apocalypse…I can hear the sound of their hooves.”
They’ve come, Rowley. They’re here. I’ve just seen three of them.
From the writing table came a soft sound as Rosamund’s melting body slithered forward onto it.