The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin Read Free Book Online Page B

“Thought you’d want to see some evidence.”
    “You devil,” she said.
    “Maybe, but this devil will save its king and its country or die trying.”
    “Or kill me in the process.” Stop it, she thought, stop sounding like a wronged woman; it was your decision.
    He shrugged. “You’ll be safe enough, nobody’s out to poison you. You’ll have Gyltha and Mansur—God help anyone who touches you while they’re around—and I’m sending servants along. I presume that canine eyesore goes, too?”
    “Yes,” she said. “His name’s Ward.”
    “One more of the prior’s finds to keep you safe? I remember Safeguard.”
    Another creature that had died saving her life. The room was full of memories that hurt—and with the dangerous value of being shared.
    “Paton is my watchdog,” he said conversationally. “He guards my virtue like a bloody chastity belt. Incidentally, wait until you see Fair Rosamund’s labyrinth—biggest in Christendom. Mind you, wait til you see Fair Rosamund herself, she’s not what you’d expect. In fact—”
    She interrupted. “Is it at risk?”
    “The labyrinth?”
    “Your virtue.”
    All at once, he was being kind. “Oddly enough, it isn’t. I thought when you turned me down…but God was kind and tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.”
    “And when Henry needed a compliant bishop.” Stop it, stop it.
    “And the world needed a doctor, not another wife,” he said, still kind. “I see that now; I have prayed to see it; marriage would have wasted you.”
    Yes, yes. If she had agreed to marriage, he’d have refused the bishopric the king had urged on him for political expediency, but for her, there had been the higher priority of her calling. She’d have had to abandon it—he’d demanded a wife, not a doctor, especially not a doctor to the dead.
    In the end, she thought, neither of us would bestow the ultimate, sacrificial gift on the other.
    He got up and went to the baby, making the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. “Bless you, my daughter.” He turned back. “Bless you, too, mistress,” he said. “God keep you both safe, and may the peace of Jesus Christ prevail over the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” He sighed. “For I can hear the sound of their hooves.”
    Father Paton came in carrying a basket and gave it to his lordship, who then gestured for him to leave.
    Adelia was still staring at Rowley. Among all this room’s superfluity of wealth, the turmoil she’d experienced in it as shades of the past came and went, one thing that should belong to it—its very purpose—had been missing; she had just caught its scent, clear and cold: sanctity, the last attribute she’d expected to find in him. Her lover had become a man of God.
    He took the chair beside her to give her details of the attempt on Rosamund’s life, putting the basket in front of her so that she could examine its contents. In the old days, he couldn’t have sat beside her without touching her; now it was like sitting next to a hermit.
    Rosamund loved stewed mushrooms, he told her; it was well known. A lazy servant, out gathering them for her mistress, had been handed some by an old, unidentified woman, a crone, and had taken them back without bothering to pick more.
    “Rosamund didn’t eat them all, some had been kept for later, and while I was with her I took the remainder to bring with me. I thought you might be able to identify the area they came from or something—you know about mushrooms, don’t you?”
    Yes, she knew about mushrooms. Obediently, Adelia began turning them over with her knife while he talked.
    It was a fine collection, though withering now: boletes that the English called Slippery Jack, winter oysters, cauliflower, blewits, hedgehogs. All very tasty but extraordinarily, most extraordinarily, varied; some of these species grew exclusively on chalk, some under pine trees, others in fields, others in broadleaf woodland.
    Deliberately or not, whoever gathered