First, though, she had to find Rowley, Jacques, and Walt.
She stood on the stairs looking for them in the confusion before her; they weren’t there, they must have been taken outside. What she did see, though, was a black shape that kept to the shadow of the walls as it made its way toward the stairs, jumping awkwardly like a frog because its feet were hobbled. The rope that had been put round its neck flapped as it came.
Adelia drew back into the dark of the staircase, and as the creature hopped up the first rise, caught it by its arm. “No,” she said.
The housekeeper’s hands and feet had been tied tightly enough to restrain a normal woman, but whoever had done it hadn’t reckoned with the abnormaclass="underline" Dakers had hopped from wherever her guards had left her in order to try and join her mistress at the top of the tower.
And still would if she could. As Adelia grabbed her, Dakers threw her thin body to shake her off. Unseen by anyone else, the two women struggled.
“You’ll burn,” hissed Adelia. “For God’s sake, do you want to burn with her?”
“Yes-s-s.”
“I won’t let you.”
The housekeeper was the weaker of the two. Giving up, she turned to face Adelia. She had been roughly treated; her nose was bleeding, and one of her eyes was closed and puffy. “Let me go, let me go. I’ll be with her. I got to be with her.”
How insane. How sad. A soldier was readying the tower’s destruction; servants were oblivious to all but their own concerns. Nobody cared if the queen’s would-be assassin died in the flames, might even prefer it if she did.
They can’t do that. She’s mad. One of the reasons Adelia loved England was that if Dakers were brought to trial for her attempt on the queen’s life, no court in the country, seeing what she was, would sentence her to death. Eleanor herself had held to it. Restrain the woman with imprisonment, yes, but the reasonable, ancient dictum of “furiosus furore solum punitur” (the madness of the insane is punishment enough) meant that anyone who’d once possessed reason but by disease, grief, or other accident had lost the use of his or her understanding must be excused the guilt of his or her crime.
It was a ruling that agreed with everything Adelia believed in, and she wasn’t going to see it bypassed, even if Dakers herself was a willing accessory and preferred to die, burning, alongside Rosamund’s body. Life was sacred; nobody knew that better than a doctor who dealt with its absence.
The woman was pulling away from her again. Adelia tightened her grip, feeling a physical revulsion; she, who was never nauseated by corpses, was repelled by this living body she had to clutch so closely to her, by its thinness-it was like hugging a bundle of sticks-by its passion for death.
“Don’t you want to avenge her?” She said it because it was all she could think of to keep the woman still, but, after a minute, a measure of sanity came into the eyes glaring into hers.
The mouth stopped hissing. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t the queen.”
Another hiss. Dakers didn’t believe her. “She paid so’s it could be done.”
“No.” Adelia added, “It wasn’t Bertha, either.”
“I know that.” Contemptuously.
There was a sudden, curious intimacy. Adelia felt herself sucked into whatever understanding the woman possessed, saw her own worth as an ally calculated, dismissed-and then retrieved. She was, after all, the only ally.
“I find things out. It’s what I do,” Adelia said, slackening her grip a little. Suppressing distaste, she added, “Come along with me and we’ll find things out together.”
Once more she was weighed, found wanting, weighed again, and adjudged as possibly useful.
Dakers nodded.
Adelia fumbled in her pocket for her knife and cut the rope round the housekeeper’s ankles and took the noose from round the neck over her head. She paused, unsure whether to free her hands as well. “You promise?”
The only good eye squinted at her. “You’ll find out?”
“I’ll try. It’s why the Bishop of Saint Albans brought me here.” Not very reassuring, she thought, considering that the Bishop of Saint Albans was leaving the place as a prisoner and Armageddon was about to break out.
Dakers held out her skinny wrists.
Schwyz had left the guardroom in order to gain control of the situation in the bailey outside. Some of the servants had gone with him; the few that remained were still gathering their goods and didn’t notice the two women sidling out.
There was equal confusion in the bailey. Adelia covered Dakers’s head with the hood of her cloak and then put up her own so that they would be just two more anonymous figures in the scurry.
A rising wind added to the noise as it whirled little showers of snowflakes that were slow to melt. Moonlight came and went like a guttering candle.
Disregarded, still clutching Dakers, Adelia moved through the chaos with Ward at her heels, looking for Rowley. She glimpsed him on the far side of the bailey, and it was a relief to see that Jacques and Walt were with him, all three roped together. Nearby, the Abbot of Eynsham was arguing over them with Schwyz, his voice dominating the noise made by the wind and bustle. “…I don’t care, you tyrant, I need to know what they know. They come with us.” Schwyz’s retort was whirled away, but Eynsham had won. The three prisoners were prodded toward the crowd at the gateway, where Eleanor was getting up on a horse.
Damn, damn it. She must talk to Rowley before they were separated. Whether she could do it unnoticed…and with a failed assassin in tow…yet she dared not let go of Dakers’s hand.
And Dakers was laughing, or, at least, a low cackle was emerging from the hood round her face. “What is it?” Adelia asked, and found that in taking her eyes off Rowley and the others she had lost sight of them. “Oh, be quiet.”
Agonized with indecision, she towed the woman toward the archway that led to the outer bailey and the entrance to the maze. The wind blew the servants’ cloaks open and closed as they milled about so that the golden lion of Aquitaine on their tabards flickered in the light of the torches. Soldiers, tidy in their padded jackets, tried to impose order, snatching unnecessary and weighty items away from clutching arms and restraining their owners from snatching them back. Only Eleanor was calm, controlling her horse with one hand and shielding her eyes with the other in order to watch what was being done, looking for something.
She saw Ward, like a small, black sheep against the snow, and pointed the animal out to Schwyz with a gloved finger as she gave an order. Schwyz looked round and pointed in his turn. “That one, Cross,” he shouted at one of his men. “Bring her. That one with the dog.”
Adelia found herself seized and hoisted onto a mule. She struggled, refusing to let go of Dakers’s hand.
The man called Cross took the line of least resistance; he lifted Dakers as well so that she clung on to Adelia’s back. “And bloody stay there,” he yelled at them. With one hand on the mule’s bridle and his body pinning Adelia’s leg, he took his charges through the archway and into the outer bailey, holding back until the rest of the cavalcade joined them.
Eleanor rode to the front, Eynsham just behind her. The open gates of the maze yawned like a black hole before them.
“Go straight through, Queen of my heart,” the abbot called to her joyfully. “Straight as my old daddy’s plow.”
“Straight?” The queen shouted back.
He spread his arms. “Didn’t you order I to learn the whore’s mysteries? Diddun I do it for ee?”
“There’s a direct way through?” Eleanor was laughing. “Abbot, my abbot. ‘And the crooked shall be made straight…’”