by Ellis Peters
She waited some minutes to allow her eyes to grow used to the dimness. A little light filtered in where the shutters joined. The roof was of thick straw thatch, sunwarmed, sagging a little between the supporting beams, and the air was heavy to stifling.
Jevan’s place of work was meticulously kept, but it was also overfilled, with all the tools of his trade, his lime tanks, nets in reserve for the river cages, piles of skins at various stages of manufacture, the drying frames, and racks of his knives, pumice, cloths for rubbing. He kept also a little oil lamp, in case he needed to finish some process in a failing light, and a box with flint and tinder, charred cloth and touchwood and sulphur-tipped spunks for kindling it. Fortunata began her search by what light came in through the shutters. The lime tanks could be disregarded, but they were so placed as to shroud one end of the workshop in darkness, and behind them lay the long shelf piled with skins still at varied stages of their finishing. Easy enough to use those to shroud a relatively small box, it could lie between them with the untrimmed edges draped to hide it. It took her a long time to go through them all, for they had to be laid aside in scrupulous order, to be restored just as she found them, all the more if she was in error, and there was still nothing to find but the box. But it was far too late to believe in that. If it had been true, why hide it, why remove it from its place in the chest, and leave his breviary stripped of its splendid covering?
The faint, furry dust danced in the thin chink of late sunlight, and tickled her throat and nostrils as she disturbed skin after skin. One pile was gradually stacked back into place, the second began to be stripped down, fold by fold, but there was nothing there but sheepskins. When that was done, the light was failing, for the sun had moved westward and vacated the chink in the shutters. She needed the lamp in order to see into the dark corners of the room, where two or three wooden chests housed a miscellany of offcuts, faulty pieces worth saving for smaller uses, and the finished gatherings of leaves ready for use, from a few great bifolia to the little, narrow, sixteen-leaf foldings used for small grammars or schooling texts. She was well aware that Jevan did not lock these. The workshop itself was locked up when vacant, and vellum was not a common temptation to theft. If one of the chests was locked now, that very fact would be significant.
It took her a little time to get the touchwood to nurse a spark, and kindle grudgingly into a tiny flame, enough to set to the wick of the lamp. She carried it to the line of chests and set it on the lid of the middle one, to shed its light within when she opened the first. If there was nothing alien here, there was nowhere else to look, the racks of tools stood open to view, the solid table was empty, but for the key of the door, which she had laid down there.
She had reached the third chest, in which the waste cuts and trimmings of vellum were tumbled, but here, too, all was as it should be. She had searched everywhere and found nothing.
She was on her knees on the beaten earth floor, lowering the lid, when she heard the door begin to open. The faint creak of the hinges froze her into stillness, her breath held. Then, very slowly, she closed the chest.
‘You have found nothing,’ said Jevan’s voice behind her, low and mild. ‘You will find nothing. There is nothing to find.’
Chapter 14
FORTUNATA BRACED HER HANDS upon the chest on which she leaned, and came slowly to her feet before she turned to face him. In the yellow gleam of the lamp she saw his face in white bone highlights and deep hollows of shadow, perfectly motionless, betraying nothing. And yet it was too late for dissembling, they had both betrayed themselves already, she by whatever sign she had inadvertently left at home to warn him, and this present search, he by following her here. Too late by far to pretend there was nothing to hide, nothing to answer, nothing to be accounted for. Too late to attempt to reconstruct the simple trust she had always had in him. He knew it was gone, as she knew now, beyond doubt, that there was reason for its going.
She sat down on the chest she had just closed, and set the lamp safely apart on the one beside it. And since silence seemed even more impossible than speech, she said simply: ‘I wondered about the box. I saw that it was gone from its place.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw the signs you left for me. I thought you had given me the box. Am I still to account for whatever I do with it?’
‘I was curious,’ she said. ‘You were going to use it for the best of your books. I wondered that it had gone out of favour in one day. But perhaps you have found a better,’ she said deliberately, ‘to take its place.’
He shook his head, advancing into the room the few steps that took him to the comer of the table where she had laid down the key. That was the moment when she was quite sure, and something withered in her memories of him, forcing her, like a wounded plant, in urgent haste towards maturity. The lamp showed his face arduously smiling, but it was more akin to a spasm of pain. ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘Why must you meddle secretly? Could you not have asked me whatever you wanted to know?’
His hand crept almost stealthily to the key. He drew back into the shadows by the door, and without taking his eyes from her, felt behind him with a grating fumble for the lock, and locked them in together.
It seemed to Fortunata then that she would do well to be a little afraid, but all she could feel was a baffled sadness that chilled her to the heart. She heard her own voice saying: ‘Had Aldwin meddled secretly? Was that what ailed him?’
Jevan braced his shoulders back against the door, and stood staring at her with stubborn forbearance, as though dealing with someone unaccountably turned idiot, but his consciously patient smile remained fixed and strained, like a convulsion of agony.
‘You are talking in riddles,’ he said. ‘What has this to do with Aldwin? I can’t guess what strange fancy you’ve got into your head, but it is an illusion. If I choose to show the gem you gave me to a friend who would appreciate it, does that mislead you into thinking I have somehow misprised or misused it?’
‘Oh, no!’ said Fortunata in the flat tone of helpless despair. ‘It will not do! Today you have been nowhere but here, not alone. If there had been no more than that, you would have taken book and all to show, you would have said what you were about. And you would not have followed me here! It was a mistake! You should have waited. I’ve found nothing. But by your coming I do know now there is something here to be found. Why else should you trouble what I did?’ A sudden gust of rage took her at his immovable and self-deceiving attempt at condescension, which struggled and failed to diminish her. ‘Why do we keep pretending?’ she cried. ‘What is the use? If I had known I would have given you the book, or taken your price for it if that was what you wanted. But now there’s murder, murder, murder in between us, and there’s no turning back or putting that away out of mind. And you know it as well as I. Why do we not speak openly? We cannot stay here for ever, unable to go forward or back. Tell me, what are we to do now?’
But that was what neither he nor she could answer. Her hands were tied like his, they were suspended in limbo together, and neither of them could cut the cord that fettered them. He would have to kill, she would have to denounce, before either of them could ever be free again, and neither of them could do it, and neither of them, in the end, would be able to refrain. There was no answer. He drew deep breath, and uttered something like a groan.
‘You meant that? You could forgive me for robbing you?’
‘Without a thought! What you took from me I can do without. But what you took from Aldwin there’s no replacing, and no one who is not Aldwin has the right to forgive it.’
‘How do you know,’ he demanded with abrupt ferocity, ‘that I ever did any harm to Aldwin?’
‘Because if you had not you would have denied it here and now, in defiance of what I may believe I know. Oh, why, why? But for that I could have held my tongue. For you I would have! But what had Aldwin ever done, to come by such a death?’
‘He opened the box,’ said Jevan starkly, ‘and looked i
nside. No one else knew. When it was opened before us all he would have blabbed it out. Now you have it! An inquisitive fool who walked in my way, and he could have betrayed me, and I should have lost it… lost it for ever… It was the box, the box that made me marvel. And he was before me, and had seen what afterwards I saw… and coveted!’
Long, heavy silences had broken the low, furious thread of this speech, as if for minutes at a time he forgot where he was, and what manner of audience he was addressing. Outside, the light was gently dimming. Within, the lamp began to burn lower. It seemed to Fortunata that they had been there together for a very long time.
‘I had only until Girard came home. I took it that very night, and put what I had in its place. I did not want to cheat you of all, I paid what I had… But then there was Aldwin. When could he ever keep to himself anything he knew? And my brother on his way home…’
Another haunted silence, in which he began to stir from his post by the door, moving restlessly the length of the room, past where she sat almost forgotten, silent and still.
‘When he went running back after Elave, that day, I had almost grown reconciled. My word against his! A risk… but almost I came to terms with it. Even now – do you see it? – all this is my word against yours, if you so choose!’ He said it without emphasis, almost indifferently. But he had remembered her again, a danger like the other. His unquiet prowling drove him back to the table. He ran the hand that was not clutching the key along the rack of his knives, in a kind of absent caress for a profession he had enjoyed and at which he had excelled.
‘In the end it was pure chance. Can you believe that? Chance that I had the knife… It was no lie, I came out here to work that afternoon. I had been using a knife – this knife…’
Time and silence hung for a long while as he took it from the rack and drew it slowly out of its leather sheath, running long fingers down the thin, sharp blade.
‘I had the sheath strapped to my belt, I forgot and left it there when I locked up to go home. And I thought I would go on through the town and go to Vespers at Holy Cross, seeing it was the day of Saint Winifred’s translation…’
He turned to look at her, darkly and intently, she sitting there slender and still on the chest beside the lamp, her grave eyes fixed unwaveringly on him. Just once he saw her glance down briefly at the knife in his hand. He turned the blade thoughtfully to catch the light. Now how easily he could end her, take the prize for which he had killed, and set out towards the west, as many and many a wanted man had done from here before him. Wales was not far, fugitives crossed that border both ways at need. But more is needed than mere opportunity. Time was passing, and it seemed this deadlock must last for ever, in a kind of self-created purgatory.
‘…I came late, they were all within, I heard the chanting. And then he came out from the little door that leads to the priest’s room! If he had not, I should have gone into the church, and there would have been no death. Do you believe that?’
Once again he had remembered her fully, as the niece of whom he had been humanly fond. And this time he wanted a reply, there was hunger in the very vibration of his voice.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do believe it.’
‘But he came. And seeing he turned towards the town, to go home, I changed my mind. It happens in a moment in a breath, and everything is changed. I fell in beside him and went with him. There was no one to see, they were all in the church. And I remembered the knife – this knife! It was very simple… nothing unseemly… He was just newly confessed and shriven, as near content as ever I knew him. At the head of the path down to the riverside I slid it into him, and drew him away in my arm down through the bushes, down to the boat under the bridge. It was still almost full daylight then, I hid him there until dark. So there was no one left to betray me.’
‘Except yourself,’ she said, ‘and now me.’
‘And you will not,’ said Jevan. ‘You cannot… any more than I can kill you…’
This time the silence was longer and even more strained, and the close, stifling air within the room dulled Fortunata’s senses. It was as if they had shut themselves for ever into a closed world where no one else could come, to shatter the tension between them and set them free to move again, to act, to go forward or back. Jevan began once more to pace the floor, turning and twisting at every few steps as though intense pain convulsed him. It went on for a long time, before he suddenly halted, and lowering with a long sigh the hands that still gripped the knife and key, went on as though only a second had passed since he last spoke:
‘…and yet in the end one of us will have to give way. There is no one else to deliver us.’
He had barely uttered it when a fist banged briskly at the door, and Hugh Beringar’s voice called loudly and cheerfully: ‘Are you within there, Master Jevan? I saw your light through the shutters. I brought your kin some good news a while ago, but you weren’t there to hear it. Open the door and hear it now!’
*
For one shocked moment Jevan froze where he stood. She felt him stiffen into ice, but his rigor lasted no longer than the flicker of an eyelid, before he heaved himself out of it with a contortion of effort like a man plucking up the weight of the world, and summoned up from somewhere the most matter-of-fact of voices to call back an answer.
‘One moment only! I’m just finishing here.’
He was at the door and turning the key as silently and softly as a cat moves. She had risen to her feet, but had not moved from her place, uncertain what he meant to do, but filled with a kind of passive wonder that kept her from making any move of her own. He gripped her by the arm with his left hand, sliding his arm through hers to hold her close and fondly by the wrist, close as a lover or an affectionate father. There was never a word said of threatening or pleading, no request for her silence and submission. Perhaps he was already sure of it, if she was not. But she watched him turn the naked knife he held in his right hand, so that the blade lay along his forearm, and the sleeve concealed it. His long fingers were competent and assured on the shaped haft. He drew her with him to the door, and she went unresisting. With the hand that nursed the knife he set the door wide open, and led her out with him on to the green meadow, into the gentle, cloudless evening light that from within had seemed to be ultimate darkness.
‘Good news is always welcome,’ he said, confronting Hugh at a few yards’ distance with an open and untroubled countenance, from which he had banished the brief, icy pallor by force of will. ‘I should have heard it soon – we’re bound for home now. My niece has been sweeping and tidying my workshop for me. You need not have gone out of your way for me, my lord, but it was gracious in you.’
‘I am not out of my way,’ said Hugh. ‘We were close, and your brother said you would be here. The matter is, I’ve set your shepherd free. A liar Conan may be, but a murderer he is not. Every part of his day is accounted for at last, and he’s back home and clear of blame. As well you should hear it from me, you may well have been wondering yourself, after all the lies he told, how deep he was mired in this business.’
‘Then does this mean,’ asked Jevan calmly, ‘that you have found the real murderer?’
‘Not yet,’ said Hugh, with an equally confident and deceptive face, ‘though it narrows the field. You’ll be glad to get your man back. And he’s mortal glad to be back, I can tell you. I suppose that affects your brother’s side of the business rather than yours, but according to Conan he has been known to help you with the skins sometimes.’ He had advanced to the door of the workshop, and was peering curiously within, into a cavern dimly lit by the little glow-worm lamp, still burning on the lid of the chest. The yellow gleam faded in the light flooding in through the wide open door. Hugh’s eyes roamed with an inquisitive layman’s interest over the great table under the shuttered windows, the chests and the lime tanks, and arrived at the long rack of knives ranged along the wall, knives for dressing, for fleshing, for scraping, for trimming.
And one of the
sheaths empty.
*
Cadfael, standing a little apart with the horses, between the belt of trees that curved round close to the river on his left hand and the open slope of meadow on his right, had a brightly lit view of the exterior of the workshop, the grassy slope, and the three figures gathered outside the open door. The sun was low, but not yet sunk behind the ridge of bushes, and the slanting westward light picked out detail with golden, glittering clarity, and found every point from which it could reflect. Cadfael was watching intently, for from this retired position he might see things hidden from Hugh, who stood close. He did not like the way Jevan was clasping Fortunata’s arm, holding her hard against his side. That embrace, uncharacteristic of so cool and self-sufficient a person as Jevan of Lythwood, Hugh certainly would not have missed. But had he seen, as Cadfael had, in one ruby-red shaft from the setting sun, and for one instant only, the steel of the knife flashing from under the cuff of Jevan’s right sleeve?
There was nothing strange in the girl’s appearance, except perhaps the unusual stillness of her face. She had nothing to say, made no motion of fear or distrust, was not uneasy at being held so, or if she was, there was no discerning it in her bearing. But she knew, quite certainly, what Jevan had in his other hand.
‘So this is where you perform your mysteries,’ Hugh was saying, advancing curiously into the workshop. ‘I’ve often wondered about your craft. I know the quality of what you produce, I’ve seen it in use, but how the leaves come by that whiteness, seeing what the raw hides are like, I’ve never understood.’
Like any inquisitive stranger, he was prowling about the room, probing into corners, but avoiding the rack of knives, since the gap would be too obvious to be missed if he went near it and made no comment. He was tempting Jevan, if he felt any anxiety or had things to hide within, to loose his hold on the girl and follow, but Jevan never relaxed his grip, only drew Fortunata with him to the doorway, and followed no further. And now indeed that strained and tethered movement began to seem sinister, and how to break the link began to seem a matter of life and death. Cadfael moved a little nearer, leading the horses.