Free The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin Page B

death declared to the world. They’ll come back to find out why it isn’t. We can be waiting for them.”
    Mansur nodded. “Some fiend intends to profit by this killing, Allah ruin him.”
    Adelia jiggled the bishop’s sleeve again. “But not if the boy seems merely to have gone away, just disappeared.”
    Rowley was doubtful. “There’ll be someone at home, worrying for him.”
    “If so, they’ll want his murderers found.”
    “He ought to be buried with decency.”
    “Not yet.”
    Pulling his arm from her grasp, the bishop went away from her. Adelia watched him go to the parapet of the bridge and lean over it, looking at the roaring water that showed white in the moonlight.
    He hates it when I do this, she thought. He was prepared to love the woman but not the doctor. Yet it was the doctor he invited along, and he must bear the consequences. I have a duty to that dead boy, and I will not abandon it.
    Now she was cold.
    “Very well.” He turned round. “You may be fortunate in that Godstow possesses an icehouse. Famous for it.”
    While the body was being wrapped in its cloak and its possessions collected, Adelia went to the fire to feed her baby.
    The Bishop of Saint Albans gathered his men round him to tell them what Dr. Mansur had discovered from reading the signs in the snow.
    “With the mercy of God, we may hope to catch these killers. Until then, not one of you—I say again, nobody —is to mention what we have seen this night. We shall keep this body reverently, but secretly, hidden in order to find out who comes back for it—and may God have mercy on their souls, for we shall not.”
    It was well done. Rowley had fought in Outremer on Crusade and found that men responded better for knowing what their commander was about than those merely given reasonless commands.
    He drew an assenting growl from the circle about him, the messenger’s particularly fervent—he and the others spent much of their lives on the road, and they saw the rider on the bridge as any one of themselves fallen to the predators infesting the highways. As Good Samaritans, they had been too late to save the traveler’s life, but they could at least bring his killers to justice.
    Only Father Paton’s frown suggested that he was assessing how much the corpse was going to cost the ecclesiastical purse.
    Baring their heads, the men took the body up and put it in the cart. With everybody walking beside it, leading their horses, they crossed the bridge to Godstow nunnery.

FOUR
    G odstow Abbey with its surrounding grounds and fields was actually a large island formed by curves of the Thames’s upper reaches and tributaries. Although the porter who unbarred its gates to the travelers was a man, as were the groom and ostler who saw to their horses, it was an island ruled by women.
    If asked, its twenty-four nuns and their female pensioners would have insisted that it was the Lord God who had called them to abandon the world, but their air of contentment suggested that the Lord’s wish had coincided exactly with their own. Some were widows with money who’d heard God’s call at their husband’s graveside and hurried to answer it at Godstow before they could be married off again. Some were maidens who, glimpsing the husbands selected for them, had been overwhelmed by a sudden vocation for chastity and had taken their dowries with them into the convent instead. Here they could administer a sizable, growing fiefdom efficiently and with a liberal hand—and they could do it without male interference.
    The only men over them were Saint Benedict, to whose rule they were subject and who was dead these six hundred and fifty years; the Pope, who was a long way away; the Archbishop of Canterbury, often ditto; and an investigative archdeacon who, because they kept their books and their behavior in scrupulous order, could make no complaint of them.
    Oh, and the Bishop of Saint Albans.
    So rich was Godstow that it possessed two churches. One,