PENGUIN CANADA
THE SERPENT’S TALE
ARIANA FRANKLIN, a former journalist, is a biographer and author of the novels City of Shadows, Mistress of the Art of Death, and Grave Goods. She is married with two daughters and lives in England.
The
Serpent’s Tale
ALSO BY ARIANA FRANKLIN
City of Shadows
Grave Goods
Mistress of the Art of Death
ARIANA FRANKLIN
The
Serpent’s Tale
PENGUIN CANADA
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Published in this edition, 2009
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Copyright © 2008 by Ariana Franklin
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To Dr. Mary Lynch, M.D., FRCP, FRCPI,
consultant cardiologist.
My literally heartfelt thanks.
PROLOGUE
T he two men’s voices carried down the tunnels with reverberations that made them indistinguishable but, even so, gave the impression of a business meeting. Which it was. In a way.
An assassin was receiving orders from his client, who was, the assassin thought, making it unnecessarily difficult for himself, as such clients did.
It was always the same; they wanted to conceal their identities, and turned up so masked or muffled you could hardly hear their instructions. They didn’t want to be seen with you, which led to assignations on blasted heaths or places like this stinking cellar. They were nervous about handing over the down payment in case you stabbed them and then ran off with it.
If they only realized it, a respectable assassin like himself had to be trustworthy; his career depended on it. It had taken time, but Sicarius (the Latin pseudonym he’d chosen for himself ) was becoming known for excellence. Whether it was translated from the Latin as “assassin” or “dagger,” it stood for the neat removal of one’s political opponent, wife, creditor, without suspicion being provable against oneself.
Satisfied clients recommended him to others who were afflicted, though they pretended to make a joke of it: “You could use the fellow they call Sicarius,” they’d say. “He’s supposed to solve troubles like yours.”
And when pressed for information: “I don’t know, of course, but rumor has it he’s to be contacted at the Bear in Southwark.” Or Fillola’s in Rome. Or La Boule in Paris. Or at whatever inn in whichever area one was plying for trade that season.
This month, Oxford. In a cellar connected by a long tunnel to the undercroft of an inn. He’d been led to it by a masked and hooded servant—oh, really, so unnecessary—and pointed toward a rich redvelvet curtain strung across one corner, hiding the client behind it and contrasting vividly with the mold on the walls and the slime underfoot. Damn it, one’s boots would be ruined.
“The ... assignment will not be difficult for you?” the curtain asked. The voice behind it had given very specific instructions.
“The circumstances are unusual, my lord,” the assassin said. He always called them “my lord.” It pleased them. “I don’t usually like to leave evidence, but if that is what you require ...”
“I do, but I meant spiritually,” the curtain said.
“Does your conscience not worry you? Don’t you fear for your soul’s damnation?”
So they’d reached that point, had they, the moment when clients distanced their morality from his, he being the low-born dirty bastard who wielded the knife and they merely the rich bastards who ordered it.
He could have said, “It’s a living and a good one, damned or not, and better than starving to death.”
He could have said, “I don’t have a conscience, I have standards, which I keep to.” He could even have said, “What about your soul’s damnation?”
But they paid for their rag of superiority, so he desisted. Instead, he said cheerily, “High or low, my lord. Popes, peasants, kings, varlets, ladies, children, I dispose of them all—and for the same price: seventy-five marks down and a hundred when the job’s done.” Keeping to the same tariff was part of his success.
“Children?” The curtain was shocked.
Oh, dear, dear. Of course children. Children inherited. Children were obstacles to the stepfather, aunt, brother, cousin who would come into the estate once the little moppet was out of the way. And more difficult to dispose of than you’d think ...
He merely said, “Perhaps you would go over the instructions again, my lord.”
Keep the client talking. Find out who he was, in case he tried to avoid the final payment. Killing those who reneged on the agreement meant tracking them down, inflicting a death that was both painfully inventive and, he hoped, a warning to future clients.
The voice behind the curtain repeated what it had already said. To be done on such and such a day, in such and such a place, by these means the death to occur in such and such a manner, this to be left, that to be taken away.
They always want precision, the assassin thought wearily. Do it this way, do it that. As if killing is a science rather than an art.
Nevertheless, in this instance, the client had planned the murder with
extraordinary detail and had intimate knowledge of his victim’s comings and goings; it would be as well to comply ...
So Sicarius listened carefully, not to the instructions—he’d memorized them the first time—but to the timbre of the client’s voice, noting phrases he could recognize again, waiting for a cough, a stutter that might later identify the speaker in a crowd.
While he listened, he looked around him. There was nothing to be learned from the servant who stood in the shadows, carefully shrouded in an unexceptional cloak and with his shaking hand—oh, bless him—on the hilt of a sword stuck into a belt, as if he wouldn’t be dead twenty times over before he could draw it. A pitiful safeguard, but probably the only creature the client trusted.
The location of the cellar, now ... it told the assassin something, if only that the client had shown cunning in choosing it. There were three exits, one of them the long tunnel, down which he’d been guided from the inn. The other two might lead anywhere, to the castle, perhaps, or—he sniffed—to the river. The only certainty was that it was somewhere in the bowels of Oxford. And bowels, as the assassin had reason to know, having laid bare quite a few, were extensive and tortuous.
Built during the Stephen and Matilda war, of course. The assassin reflected uneasily on the tunneling that had, literally, undermined England during the thirteen years of that unfortunate and bloody fracas. The strategic jewel that was Oxford, guarding the country’s main routes south to north and east to west, where they crossed the Thames, had suffered badly. Besieged and re-besieged, people had dug like moles both to get in and to get out. One of these days, he thought—and God give it wasn’t today—the bloody place would collapse into the wormholes they’d made of its foundations.
Oxford, he thought. A town held mainly for King Stephen and, therefore, the wrong side. Twenty years on, and its losers still heaved with resentment against Matilda’s son, Henry Plantagenet, the ultimate winner and king.
The assassin had gained a deal of information while in the area—it always paid to know who was upside with whom, and why—and he thought it possible that the client was one of those still embittered by the war and that the assignment was, therefore, political.
In which case it could be dangerous. Greed, lust, revenge: Their motives were all one to him, but political clients were usually of such high degree that they had a tendency to hide their involvement by hiring yet another murderer to kill the first, i.e., him. It was always wearisome and only led to more bloodletting, though never his.
Aha. The unseen client had shifted, and for a second, no more, the tip of a boot had shown beneath the curtain hem. A boot of fine doeskin, like one’s own, and new, possibly recently made in Oxford—again, like one’s own.
A round of the local boot makers was called for.
“We are agreed, then?” the curtain asked.
“We are agreed, my lord.”
“Seventy-five marks, you say?”
“In gold, if you please, my lord,” the assassin said, still cheerful. “And similarly with the hundred when the job’s done.”
“Very well,” the client said, and told his servant to hand over the purse containing the fee.
And in doing so made a mistake which neither he nor the servant noticed but which the assassin found informative. “Give Master Sicarius the purse, my son,” the client said.
In fact, the clink of gold from the purse as it passed was hardly less satisfactory than that the assassin now knew his client’s occupation.
And was surprised.
ONE
T he woman on the bed had lost the capacity to scream. Apart from the drumming of her feet and the thump of her fists against the sheets, her gyrations were silent, as if she were miming agony.
The three nuns, too, kneeling at either side, might have been aping intercession; their mouths moved soundlessly, because any noise, even the sibilance of a whispered prayer, set off another convulsion in the patient. They had their eyes closed so as not to see her suffering. Only the woman standing at the end of the bed watched it, showing no expression.
On the walls, Adam and Eve skipped in innocent tapestried health among the flora and fauna of the Garden while the Serpent, in a tree, and God, on a cloud, looked on with amiability. It was a circular room, its beauty now mocking the ghastliness of its owner: the fair hair that had turned black and straggled with sweat, the corded veins in the once-white neck, lips stretched in the terrible grin.
What could be done had been done. Candles and burning incense holders heated a room where the lattices and shutters had been stuffed closed so as not to rattle.
Mother Edyve had stripped Godstow, her convent, of its reliquaries in order to send the saints’ aid to this stricken woman. Too old to come herself, she had told Sister Havis, Godstow’s prioress, what to do. Accordingly, the tibia of Saint Scholastica had been tied to the flailing arm, droplets from the phial containing Saint Mary’s milk poured on the poor head, and a splinter of the True Cross placed into the woman’s hand, though it had been jerked across the room during a spasm.
Carefully, so as not to make a noise, Sister Havis got up and left the room. The woman who had been standing at the end of the bed followed her. “Where you going?”
“To fetch Father Pol. I sent for him; he’s waiting in the kitchen.”
“No.”
Like the stern but well-born Christian she was, Havis showed patience to the afflicted, though this particular female always made her flesh creep. She said, “It is time, Dakers. She must receive the viaticum.”
“I’ll kill you. She ain’t going to die. I’ll kill the priest if he comes upstairs.”
It was spoken without force or apparent emotion, but the prioress believed it of this woman; every servant in the place had already run away for fear of what she might do if their mistress died.
“Dakers, Dakers,” she said—always name the mad when speaking to them so as to remind them of themselves—“we cannot deny the rite of holy unction’s comfort to a soul about to begin its journey. Look ...” She caught hold of the housekeeper’s arm and turned her so that both women faced into the room where their muttered voices had caused the body on the bed to arch again. Only its heels and the top of its head rested on the bed, forming a tortured bridge.
“No human frame can withstand such torment,” Sister Havis said. “She is dying.” With that, she began to go down the stairs.
Footsteps followed her, causing her to hold fast to the banister in case she received a push in the back. She kept on, but it was a relief to gain the ground and go into white-cold fresh air as she crossed to the kitchen that had been modeled on that of Fontevrault, with its chimneys, and stood like a giant pepper pot some yards away from the tower.
The flames in one of the fireplaces were the only light and sent leaps of red reflection on the drying sheets that hung from hooks normally reserved for herbs and flitches of bacon.
Father Pol, a mousy little man, and mousier than ever tonight, crouched on a stool, cradling a fat black cat as if he needed its comfort in this place.
His eyes met the nun’s and then rolled in inquiry toward the figure of the housekeeper.
“We are ready for you now, Father,” the prioress told him.
The priest nodded in relief. He stood up, carefully placed the cat on the stool, gave it a last pat, picked up the chrismatory at his feet, and scuttled out. Sister Havis waited a moment to see if the housekeeper would come with them, saw that she would not, and followed Father Pol.
Left alone, Dakers stared into the fire.
The blessing by the bishop who had been called to her mistress two days ago had done nothing. Neither had all the convent’s trumpery. The Christian god had failed.
Very well.
She began to move briskly. Items were taken from the cupboard in the tiny room that was her domain next to the kitchen. When she came back, she was muttering. She put a leather-bound book with a lock on the chopping block. On it was placed a crystal that, in the f
irelight, sent little green lights from its facets wobbling around the room.
One by one, she lit seven candles and dripped the wax of each onto the block to make a stand. They formed a circle round the book and crystal, giving light as steady as the ones upstairs, though emitting a less pleasant smell than beeswax.
The cauldron hanging from a jack over the fire was full and boiling, and had been kept so as to provide water for the washing of the sickroom sheets. So many sheets.
The woman bent over it to make sure that the surface of the water bubbled. She looked around for the cauldron’s lid, a large, neatly holed circle of wood with an iron handle arched over its center, found it, and leaned it carefully on the floor at her feet. From the various fire irons by the side of the hearth, dogs, spits, etc., she picked out a long poker and laid that, too, on the floor by the lid.
“Igzy-bidzy,” she was muttering, “sishnu shishnu, adony-manooey, eelam-peelam ...” The ignorant might have thought the repetition to be that of a child’s skipping rhyme; others would have recognized the deliberately garbled, many-faithed versions of the holy names of God.
Dodging the sheets, Dame Dakers crossed to where Father Pol had been sitting and picked up the cat, cradling and petting it as he had done. It was a good cat, a famous ratter, the only one she allowed in the place.
Taking it to the hearth, she gave it a last stroke with one hand and reached for the cauldron lid with the other.
Still chanting, she dropped the cat into the boiling water, swiftly popping the lid in place over it and forcing it down. The poker was slid through the handle so that it overlapped the edges.
For a second the lid rattled against the poker and a steaming shriek whistled through the lid’s holes. Dame Dakers knelt on the hearth’s edge, commending the sacrifice to her master.
If God had failed, it was time to petition the Devil.
Eighty-odd miles to the east as the crow flew, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar was delivering a baby for the first time—or trying to deliver it.