The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin

Author:Ariana Franklin [Franklin, Ariana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Adult, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Suspense, Crime
ISBN: 9780399154645
Google: oq1WTbo3ArgC
Amazon: B002BWQ5KY
Goodreads: 1232140
Publisher: Putnam
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When she woke up, it was afternoon. Mansur had gone back to the men’s guesthouse to rest. Gyltha was sitting beside the bed, knitting—a skill she’d picked up from one of her Scandinavian customers during her eel-selling days.

Adelia’s eyes rested on the chubby little figure of Allie as it hitched itself around the floor on its bottom, chasing the dog and grimacing to show the one tiny tooth that had manifested itself in her lower gum since her mother had last seen her. “I swear I’ll never leave you again,” she told her.

Gyltha snorted. “I keep telling you, ‘twas only thirty hours.”

But Adelia knew the separation had been longer than that. “It was nearly permanent,” she’d said, and added painfully, “For Rowley, it has been.”

Gyltha wouldn’t countenance it. “He’ll be back, large as life and twice as natural. Take more than a bit of old snow to finish off that lad.” To Gyltha, the Right Reverend Lord Bishop of Saint Albans would always be “that lad.”

“He can stay away for me,” Adelia said. She clung on to her grievance against him like a raft to keep her from being subsumed in grief. “He didn’t care, Gyltha, not for his life, not Allie’s, not mine.”

“Except to make the sun come up.”

“A’course he didn’t, he’s out to stop a war as’ll take more lives than yours. God’s work that is, and the Lord’ll watch over un according.”

Adelia clung to that, too, but she had been deeply frightened. “I don’t care, if it’s God’s work, let Him do it. We are leaving. As soon as the snow clears, we’re all slipping away back to the fens.”

“Oh, ar?” Gyltha said.

“It’s not ‘oh, ar.’ I mean it.” In the fens, her life had been acceptable, regulated, useful. She’d been ripped away from it, subjected to, and then abandoned in, physical and mental turmoil by the man at whose request she had become embroiled in it in the first place. Almost worse than anything, he had revived in her an emotion that she’d thought to be dead, that was better dead.

“Except to make the sun come up.”

Damn him, don’t think of it.

Gaining anger, she said, “It’s all high politics, anyway. That’s what Rosamund’s killing was, as far as I can see—an assassination to do with queens and kings and political advantage. It’s outside my scope. Was it the mushrooms? Yes, it probably was. Do I know who sent them? No, I don’t, and there’s an end to it. I’m a doctor, I won’t be drawn into their wars. God’s rib, Gyltha, Eleanor abducted me, abducted me—I nearly ended up joining her damned army.”

“Shouldn’t have saved her life, then, should you?”

“What was I to do? Dakers was coming at her with a knife.”

“You sure you don’t want to know who else’s turned up?”

“No. I only want to know whether anybody’s likely to stop us going.”

But it appeared that in the physical collapse affecting all the travelers, even Eleanor, on their arrival at the convent, nobody had spared

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