Apparently, it did-and would. Pride mattered to a queen. Her enemies knew it; so did the enemies of the king.
“I’ll kill the bitch if she isn’t dead already,” said the man of God. “I’ll burn the place down, and her in it. This is an invitation to war.”
She was puzzled. “You’ve been here before, I’d expect you to have seen it already.”
He shook his head. “We met in the garden; she was taking the air. We gave thanks to God for her recovery, and then Dakers led me back through the Wyrm. Where is Dakers?”
He pushed past Jacques and Walt, who stood blinking in the doorway, and attacked the stairs, shouting for the housekeeper. Doors slammed open as he looked into the next room, dismissed it, and raced upward to the next.
They hurried after him, the tower resounding with the crash of boots and the click of a dog’s paws on stone.
Now they were climbing past Rosamund’s apartments. Dakers, if it was Dakers, had been able to preserve them in all their glory. Adelia, trying to keep up, was vouchsafed glimpses of spring and autumn come together. Persian carpets, Venetian goblets, damask divans, gold-rich icons and triptychs, arras, statuary: the spoils of an empire laid at the feet of an emperor’s mistress.
Here were glazed windows, not the arrow slits of the rooms below. They were shuttered, but the taper’s light as Adelia passed reflected an image of itself in lattices of beautiful and expensive glass.
And through the open doors came perfume, subtle but strong enough to delight a nose deadened by cold and the foul pelt of a dog.
Adelia sniffed. Roses. He even captured roses for her.
Above her, another door was flung against its jamb. A sharp exclamation from the bishop.
“What is it, what is it?” She reached him on the last landing; there were no more stairs. Rowley was standing facing the open door, but the lit candle in his hand was down by his side, dripping wax onto the floor.
“What is it?”
“You were wrong,” Rowley said.
The cold up here was extraordinary.
“Was I?”
“She’s alive. Rosamund. Alive after all.”
The relief would have been immeasurable if it hadn’t been that he was so strange and there was no light in the room he was facing.
Also, he was making no effort to enter.
“She’s sitting there,” he said, and made the sign of the cross.
Adelia went in, the dog following her.
No perfume here, the cold obliterated scent. Each window-at least eight of them encircled the room-was open, its glazed lattice and accompanying shutter pushed outward to allow in air icy enough to kill. Adelia felt her face shrivel from it.
Ward went ahead. She could hear him sniffing round the room, giving no sign that he encountered anybody. She went in a little farther.
The glow of the taper fell on a bed against the northerly wall. Exquisite white lace swept from a gilded rondel in the ceiling to part over pillows and fall at either side of a gold-tasseled coverlet. It was a high and magnificent bed, with a tiny ivory set of steps placed so that its owner might be assisted to reach it.
Nobody was in it.
Its owner was sitting at a writing table opposite, facing a window, a pen in her hand.
Adelia, her taper now vibrating a little, saw the glancing facets of a jeweled crown and ash-blond hair curling from it down the writer’s back.
Go nearer. You have to. It can’t harm you. It can’t.
She willed herself forward. As she passed the bed, she stepped on a fold of its lace lying on the floor, and the ice in it crunched under her boot.
“Lady Rosamund?” It seemed polite to say it, even knowing what she knew.
She took off her glove to touch the figure’s unexpectedly large shoulder and felt the chill of stone in what had once been flesh. She saw a white, white hand, its wrist braceleted with skin, like a baby’s. Thumb and forefinger were supporting a goose quill as if it had only seconds ago drawn the signature on the document on which they rested.
Sighing, Adelia bent to look into the face. Open, blue eyes were slightly cast downward so that they appeared to be rereading what the hand had just written.
But Fair Rosamund was very dead.
And very fat.
SIX
Dakers,” Adelia said. “Dakers did this.”
Only Dame Dakers could be refusing to let her dead mistress go to her grave.
Rowley was recovering. “We’ll never get her in the coffin like that. For the love of God, do something. I’m not rowing back to Godstow with her sitting up and looking at me.”
“Show some respect, blast you.” Banging the last window closed, Adelia turned on him. “You won’t be rowing, and she won’t be sitting.”
Both were compensating in their own way for the impact of a scene that had unmanned him and unnerved her.
Jacques was staring from the doorway, but Walt, having peered in, had retired downstairs in a hurry. Ward, unperturbed, was scratching himself.
Used to dead bodies as she was, Adelia had never feared one-until now. Consequently, she’d become angry. It was the corpse’s employment.…Rosamund hadn’t died in that position-if it werethe mushrooms that had killed her, the end would have been too violent. No, Dakers had dragged the still-warm carcass onto the Roman chair, arranged it, and then either waited for rigor mortis to set in or, if rigor had already passed, held it in place until the cold coming through the open windows had fixed head, trunk, and limbs as they were now, frozen in the attitude of writing.
Adelia knew this as surely as if she’d seen it happen, but the impression that the dead woman had got up, walked to her table, sat down, and picked up a pen could not be shaken off.
Rowley’s peevishness merely disguised the revulsion that had thrown him off balance, and Adelia, who felt the same, responded to it with irritation. “You didn’t tell me she was fat.”
“Is it relevant?”
No, it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, but it was a sort of aftershock. The image Adelia had gained of Fair Rosamund by repute, from meeting Bertha, from tramping through the dreadful maze, from seeing the even more dreadful mantrap, had been of a beautiful woman with the indifference to human suffering of an Olympian goddess: physically lovely, pampered, aloof, cold as a reptile-but slim. Definitely slim.
Instead, the face she’d bent down to peer into had looked back at her with the innocent chubbiness integral to the obese.
It altered things. She wasn’t sure why, but it did.
“How long has she been dead?” Rowley demanded.
“What?” Adelia’s mind had wandered into inconsequential questioning of the corpse. Why, with your weight, did you live at the top of this tower? How did you get down the stairs to meet Rowley in the garden?
How did you get back up?
“I said, how long has she been dead?”
“Oh.” It was time to collect her wits and do the job she’d been brought here to do. “Impossible to be exact.”
“Was it the mushrooms?”
“How can I tell? Probably yes.”
“Can you flatten her?”
God’s rib, he was a crude man. “She’ll flatten herself,” Adelia said, shortly, “just get some heat into this damned room.” Then she asked, “Why did Dakers want her to be seen writing, do you suppose?”
But the bishop was on the landing, shouting to Walt to bring braziers, kindling, firewood, candles, pushing Jacques into descending and helping the groom, then going down himself on another search for the housekeeper, taking energy with him and leaving the chamber to the quiet of the dead.
Adelia’s thoughts rested wistfully on the man whose calm assistance and reassurance had always been her rock during difficult investigations-for never was one likely to be more difficult than this. Mansur, however, was on the barge bringing Rosamund’s coffin upriver and, even supposing he had arrived at the landing place that served Wormhold Tower a quarter of a mile away, he, Oswald, and the men with them had been told to stay there until the messenger fetched them.