“Reckon as it’ll do for now,” Walt said grudgingly.
The others left him chipping ice from the well’s windlass.
The pillagers had been arbitrary and hurried. An otherwise deserted byre held a cow that had resisted theft by being in the act of delivering its calf. Both were dead, the calf still in its birth sac.
Dodging under a washing line on which hung sheets as stiff as metal, they explored the kitchen buildings. The scullery had been stripped of its sink, the kitchen of everything except a massive table too heavy to lift.
Trying the barn, they found indentations in its earth floor to show where a plow and harrow had once stood. And…
“What’s this, my lord?”
Jacques was holding up his lantern to a large contraption in a corner by a woodpile.
It was metal. A flanged footplate formed the base of two upright struts attached to it by heavy springs. Both sets of struts ended in a row of triangular iron teeth, shaped to fit into the corresponding row of the other’s.
The men paused.
Walt rejoined them, to stare. “Seen ’em as’ll take your leg,” he said slowly. “Never like this un, though.”
“Neither have I,” Rowley told him. “God be merciful, somebody’s actually oiled it.”
“What is it?” Adelia asked.
Without answering, Rowley went up to the contraption and grasped one set of its teeth. Walt took the other and, between them, they pulled the two sets of struts’ rows apart until each lay flat on the ground opposite the other, teeth gaping upward. “All right, Walt. Careful now.” Rowley bent and, keeping his body well away, extended an arm to fumble underneath the mechanism. “Works by a trigger,” he said. Walt nodded.
“What is it?” Adelia asked again.
Rowley stood up and picked up a log from the woodpile. He gestured for Adelia to keep her dog away. “Imagine it lying in long grass. Or under snow.”
Almost flat, as the thing was now, it would be undetectable.
It’s a mantrap. Oh, God help us.
She bent and grasped Ward’s collar.
Rowley chucked the log onto the contraption’s metal plate.
The thing leaped upward like a snapping shark. The teeth met. The clang seemed to come later.
After a moment, Walt said, “Get you round the whatsis, that would, begging your pardon, mistress. No point in gettin’ you out, either.”
“The lady didn’t care for poachers, it seems,” the bishop said. “Damned if I go wandering her woods.” He dusted his hands. “Come on, now. This won’t beat the Bulgars, as my old granddad used to say. We need a ram.”
Adelia stayed where she was, staring at the mantrap. At two and a half feet high, the teeth would engage around the average man’s groin, spiking him through. As Walt had said, releasing the victim would make no difference to an agonizing and prolonged death.
The thing was still vibrating, as if it were licking its chops.
The bishop had to come back for her.
“Somebody made it,” she said. “Somebody oiled it. For use.”
“I know. Come along, now.”
“This is an awful place, Rowley.”
“I know.”
Jacques found a sawing horse in one of the outhouses. Holding it sideways by its legs and running with it, he and Walt managed to break down the tower’s back door at the third attempt.
It was nearly as cold inside as out. And more silent.
They were in a round hall that, because of the tower’s greater base, was larger than any room they were likely to find upstairs. Not a place for valued visitors to wait; it was more a guardroom. A couple of beautiful watchman’s chairs, too heavy to be looted, were its saving grace. For the rest, hard benches and empty weapon racks made up the furniture. Cressets had been torn from the walls, a chandelier from its chain.
Some tapers clipped into their holders were strewn among the rushes of the floor. Lighting them from the lantern, Rowley, Adelia, and Walt took one each and began the ascent of the bare staircase running upward around the wall.
They found the tower to be one circular room placed on another, like a tube of apothecary’s pills wrapped in stiff paper and set upright, the door to each reached by a curving flight and a tiny landing. The second they came to was as utilitarian as the first, its empty racks, some dropped strands of polishing horsetail, and the smell of beeswax suggesting an overlarge cleaning cupboard.
Above that, the maids’ room: four wooden beds and little else. All the beds were stripped of palliasse and covering.
Each room was deserted. Each was marginally less uncomfortable than the one below. A sewing room-looted, for the most part, but the bench tables set under each arrow slit to catch the light carried torn strips of material and an errant pincushion. A plaster dummy had been smashed to the floor, and shards of it were seemingly kicked onto the landing.
“They hated her,” said Adelia, peering in through the arched doorway.
“Who?”
“The servants.”
“Hated who?” The bishop was beginning to puff.
“Rosamund,” Adelia told him. “Or Dame Dakers.”
“With these stairs? I don’t blame ’em.”
She grinned at his laboring back. “You’ve been eating too many episcopal dinners.”
“As you say, mistress.” He was unoffended. It was a rebuff; in the old days, he’d have been indignant.
I must remember, she thought. We are no longer intimate; we keep our distance.
The fourth room-or was it the fifth?-had not been looted, though it was starker than any. A truckle bed, its gray, knitted bedspread rigidly tucked in. A deal table on which stood ewer and basin. A stool. A plain chest with a few bits of women’s clothing, equally plain and neatly folded.
“Dakers’s room,” Adelia said. She was beginning to get the feel of the housekeeper, and was daunted by it.
“Nobody’s here. Leave it.”
But Adelia was interested. Here, the looters had desisted. Here, she was sure, Dragon Dakers had stood on the stairs, as frightening as Bertha described her, and stopped them from going farther.
Rosamund’s escutcheon was carved into the eastern section of the west wall above Dakers’s bed; it had been painted and gilded so that it dominated the gray room. Raising her candle to look at it, Adelia heard an intake of breath from Rowley in the doorway that wasn’t due to exertion.
“God’s teeth,” he said, “that’s madness.”
A carved outer shield showed three leopards and the fleur-de-lis, which every man and woman in England now recognized as the arms of their Angevin Plantagenet king. Inside it was a smaller shield, checkered, with one quarter containing a serpent, the other a rose.
Even Adelia’s scanty knowledge of heraldry was enough to know that she was looking at the escutcheon of a man and his wife.
The bishop, staring, joined her. “Henry. In the name of God, Henry, what were you doing to allow this? It’s madness.”
A motto had been carved into the wall beneath the escutcheon. Like most armorial mottos, it was a pun. Rosa Mundi.
Rose of all the world.
“Oh, dear,” Adelia said.
“Jesus have mercy,” Rowley breathed. “If the queen saw this…”
Together, motto and escutcheon made the taunt of all taunts: He prefers me to you. I am his wife in all but name, the true queen of his heart.
The bishop’s mind was leaping ahead. “Damnation. Whether Eleanor’s seen it or not is irrelevant. It’s enough for others to assume that she knows of it and had Rosamund killed because of it. It’s a reason to kill. It’s flaunting usurpation.”
“It’s a bit of stone with patterns on it put up by a silly woman,” Adelia protested. “Does it matter so much?”