Which could not be tonight. Nobody was going to face the maze of the Wyrm again tonight.
She had only one light; Rowley had taken his taper with him. She put hers on the writing table as near to the corpse’s hand as possible without burning it-a minuscule start to the thawing out of the body that not only would take time but would be messy.
Adelia brought to mind the pigs on which she had studied decomposition at the farm in the hills above Salerno, kept for the purpose by Gordinus, her teacher of the process of mortification. From the various carcasses, her memory went to those frozen in the icehouse he’d had built deep into rock. She calculated weights, times; she envisaged needles of ice crystals solidifying muscle and tissue…and the resultant juices as they melted.
Poor Rosamund. She would be exposed to the outrages of corruption when everything in her chamber spoke of a being who’d loved elegance.
Poor Dakers, who had, undoubtedly, loved her mistress to the point of madness.
Who had also put a crown on her mistress’s head. A real crown, not a fashionable circlet, not a chaplet, not a coronal, but an ancient thing of thick gold with four prongs that rose in the shape of fleur-de-lis from a jeweled brim-the crown of a royal consort. This, Dakers was saying, is a queen.
Yet the same hand had brushed the lovely hair so that it hung untrammeled over the corpse’s shoulders and down its back in the style of a virgin.
Oh, get to it, Adelia told herself. She was not here to be fascinated by the unplumbable depths of human obsession but to find out why someone had found it good that this woman should die and, thereby, who that someone was.
She wished there was some noise from downstairs to ameliorate the deathly quiet of this room. Perhaps it was too high up for sound to reach it.
Adelia turned her attention to the writing table, an eerie business with the shuttered glass on the other side of it acting on it like the silvering of a looking glass, so that she and the corpse were reflected darkly.
A pretty table, highly polished. Near the dead woman’s left hand, as if her fingers could dip into it easily, was a bowl of candied plums.
The bowl was a black-and-red pot figured with athletes like the one her foster father had found in Greece, so ancient and precious that he allowed no one to touch it but himself. Rosamund kept sweetmeats in hers.
A glass inkwell encased in gold filigree. A smart leather holder for quills, and a little ivory-and-steel knife to sharpen them. Two pages of the best vellum, both closely written, lying side by side, one under the right hand. A sand shaker, also glass, in gold filigree matching the inkwell, its sand nearly used up. A tiny burner for melting the wax that lay by it in two red sticks, one shorter than the other.
Adelia looked for a seal and found none, but there was a great gold ring on one of the dead fingers. She picked up the taper and held it close to the ring. Its round face was a matrix that when pressed into softened wax would embed the two letters RR.
Rosamund Regina?
Hmm.
It had mattered to Dakers that Rosamund be recognized as literate-no mean accomplishment in England, even among high-born women. Why else had she been petrified like this? Obviously, she had been literate. The table’s implements showed heavy use; Rosamund had written a lot.
Was Dakers merely proud that you could write? Or is there some other significance that I’m not seeing?
Adelia turned her attention to the two pieces of vellum. She picked up the one directly in front of the corpse-and found it indecipherable in this light; Rosamund’s literacy had not extended to good calligraphy-here was a cramped scrawl.
She wondered where Rowley was with more candles, blast him. It was taking the bishop a long time to return. For just a second, Adelia registered the fact, then found that by extending the parchment above her head with one hand, putting the taper dangerously close underneath it with the other, and squinting, it was just possible to make out a superscription. What she held was a letter.
“To the Lady Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine and supposed Queen of England, greetings from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.”
Adelia’s jaw dropped. So, very nearly, did the letter. This wasn’t lèse-majesté, it was outright, combative treason. It was a challenge.
It was stupid.
“Were you insane?” The whisper was absorbed by the room’s silence.
Rosamund was sending a challenge to Eleanor’s authority, and must have known it was one the queen would have to respond to or be forever humiliated.
“You were taking a risk,” Adelia whispered. Wormhold Tower might be difficult to seize, but it wasn’t impregnable; it couldn’t withstand the sort of force that an infuriated queen would send against it.
The deadness of the corpse whispered back, Ah, but instead did the queen send an old woman with poisoned mushrooms?
None of the above, Adelia thought to herself, because Eleanor didn’t receive the letter. Most likely, Rosamund had never intended to send it; isolated in this awful tower, she’d merely amused herself by scribbling fantasies of queenship onto vellum.
What else had she written?
Adelia replaced the letter on the table and picked up its companion document. In the dimness, she made out another superscription. Another letter, then. Again, it had to be held up so that the taper shone upward onto it. This one was easier to read.
“To the Lady Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine and supposed Queen of England, greetings from the true and very Queen of this country, Rosamund the Fair.”
The wording was exactly the same. And it was more decipherable only because somebody else had written it. This hand was very different from Rosamund’s scrawl; it was the legible, sloping calligraphy of a scholar.
Rosamund had copied her letter from this one.
Ward gave a low growl, but Adelia, caught up in the mystery, paid him no attention.
It’s here. I am on the brink of it.
Waving the parchment gently, she thought it out, then saw in the mirror of the window that she was, in fact, tapping Rosamund’s head with it.
And stopped, she and the corpse each as rigid as the other. Ward had tried to warn her that someone else had entered the tower room; she’d paid no notice.
Three faces were reflected in the glass, two of them surmounted by crowns. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, my dear,” one of them said-and it wasn’t talking to Adelia.
Who, for a moment, stood where she was, staring straight ahead, trying to subdue shivering superstition, gathering all her common sense against belief in the wizardry of conjurement.
Then she turned and bowed. There was no mistaking a real queen.
Eleanor took no notice of her. She walked to one side of the table, bringing with her a scent that subsumed Rosamund’s roses in something heavier and more Eastern. Two white, long-fingered hands were placed on the wood as she bent forward to look into the face of the dead woman. “Tut, tut. You have let yourself go.” A beringed forefinger nudged the Greek pot. “Do I suspect too many sweeties and not enough sallets?”
Her voice belled charmingly across the chamber. “Did you know that poor Rosamund was fat, Lord Montignard? Why was I not told?”
“Cows usually are, lady.” A man’s voice, coming from a shape lounging in the doorway and holding a lantern. There was an indistinct, taller figure in mail standing behind him.