by Ellis Peters
Hugh passed by him, and entered a small room, warmed by a little charcoal brazier set on a flat slab of stone, and lit by a torch in a sconce on the wall. Close under the light the dowager lady of Longner sat on a bench against the wall, propped erect with rugs and cushions, and in her stillness and composure dominating the room. She was past forty-five and long, debilitating illness had aged her into a greyness and emaciation beyond her years. She had a distaff set up before her, and was twisting the wool with a hand that looked frail as a withered leaf, but was patient and competent as it teased out and twirled the strands. She looked up, at Hugh’s entrance, with a startled smile, and let down the spindle to rest against the foot of the bench.
“Why, my lord, how good of you! It’s a long time since I saw you last.” That had been at her husband’s funeral, seven months past now. She gave him her hand, light as a windflower in his, and as cold when he kissed it. Her eyes, which were huge and dusky blue, and sunk deeply into her head, looked him over with measured and shrewd intelligence. “Your office becomes you,” she said. “You look well on responsibility. I am not so vain as to think you made the journey here to see me, when you have such weighty burdens on your time. Had you business with Eudo? Whatever brought you, a glimpse of you is very welcome.”
“They keep me busy,” he said, with considered reserve. “Yes, I had business of a sort with Eudo. Nothing that need trouble you. And I must not stay to tire you too long, and with you I won’t talk business. How are you? And is there anything you need, or any way I can serve you?”
“All my needs are met before I can even ask,” said Donata. “Eudo is a good soul, and I’m lucky in the daughter he’s brought me. I have no complaints. Did you know the girl is already pregnant? And sturdy and wholesome as good bread, sure to get sons. Eudo has done well for himself. Perhaps I do miss the outside world now and then. My son is wholly taken up with making his manor worth a little more every harvest, especially now he looks forward to a son of his own. When my lord was alive, he looked beyond his own lands. I got to hear of every move up or down in the king’s fortunes. The wind blew from wherever Stephen was. Now I labour behind the times. What is going on in the world outside?”
She did not sound to Hugh in need of any protection from the incursions of the outside world, near or far, but he stepped cautiously in consideration of her son’s anxieties. “In our part of it, very little. The Earl of Gloucester is busy turning the south-west into a fortress for the Empress. Both factions are conserving what they have, and for the moment neither side is for fighting. We sit out of the struggle here. Lucky for us!”
“That sounds,” she said, attentive and alert, “as if you have very different news from elsewhere. Oh, come, Hugh, now you are here you won’t deny me a little fresh breeze from beyond the pales of Eudo’s fences? He shrouds me in pillows, but you need not.” And indeed it seemed to Hugh that even his unexpected company had brought a little wan colour to her fallen face, and a spark to her sunken eyes.
He admitted wryly: “There’s news enough from elsewhere, a little too much for the king’s comfort. At St. Albans there’s been the devil to pay. Half the lords at court, it seems, accused the Earl of Essex of having traitorous dealings with the Empress yet again, and plotting the king’s overthrow, and he’s been forced to surrender his constableship of the Tower, and his castle and lands in Essex. That or the gallows, and he’s by no means ready to die yet.”
“And he has surrendered them? That would go down very bitterly with such a man as Geoffrey de Mandeville,” she said, marvelling. “My lord never trusted him. An arrogant, overbearing man, he said. He has turned his coat often enough before, it may very well be true he had plans to turn it yet again. It’s well that he was brought to bay in time.”
“So it might have been, but once he was stripped of his lands they turned him loose, and he’s made off into his own country and gathered the scum of the region about him. He’s sacked Cambridge. Looted everything worth looting, churches and all, before setting light to the city.”
“Cambridge?” said the lady, shocked and incredulous. “Dare he attack a city like Cambridge? The king must surely move against him. He cannot be left to pillage and burn as he pleases.”
“It will not be easy,” said Hugh ruefully. The man knows the Fen country like the lines of his hand, it’s no simple matter to bring him to a pitched battle in such country.”
She leaned to retrieve the spindle as a movement of her foot set it rolling. The hand with which she recoiled the yarn was languid and translucent, and the eyelids half-lowered over her hollow eyes were marble-white, and veined like the petals of a snowdrop. If she felt pain, she betrayed none, but she moved with infinite care and effort. Her lips had the strong set of reticence and durability.
“My son is there among the fens,” she said quietly. “My younger son. You’ll remember, he chose to take the cowl, in September of last year, and entered Ramsey Abbey.”
“Yes, I remember. When he brought back your lord’s body for burial, in March, I did wonder if he might have thought better of it by then. I wouldn’t have said your Sulien was meant for a monk, from all I’d seen of him he had a good, sound appetite for living in the world. I thought six months of it might have changed his mind for him. But no, he went back, once that duty was done.”
She looked up at him for a moment in silence, the arched lids rolling back from still lustrous eyes. The faintest of smiles touched her lips and again faded. “I hoped he might stay, once he was home again. But no, he went back. It seems there’s no arguing with a vocation.”
It sounded like a muted echo of Ruald’s inexorable departure from world and wife and marriage, and it was still ringing in Hugh’s ears as he took his leave of Eudo in the darkening courtyard, and mounted and rode thoughtfully home. From Cambridge to Ramsey is barely twenty miles, he was reckoning as he went. Twenty miles, to the north-west, a little further removed from London and the head of Stephen’s strength. A little deeper into the almost impenetrable world of the Fens, and with winter approaching. Let a mad wolf like de Mandeville once establish a base, islanded somewhere in those watery wastes, and it will take all Stephen’s forces ever to flush him out again.
*
Brother Cadfael went up to the Potter’s Field several times while the ploughing continued, but there were no more such unexpected finds to be made. The ploughman and his ox-herd had proceeded with caution at every turn under the bank, wary of further shocks, but the furrows opened one after another smooth and dark and innocent. The word kept coming to mind. Earth, Ruald had said, is innocent. Only the use we make of it can mar it. Yes, earth and many other things, knowledge, skill, strength, all innocent until use mars them. Cadfael considered in absence, in the cool, autumnal beauty of this great field, sweeping gently down from its ridge of bush and bramble and tree, hemmed on either side by its virgin headlands, the man who had once laboured here many years, and had uttered that vindication of the soil on which he laboured, and from which he dug his clay. Utterly open, decent and of gentle habit, a good workman and an honest citizen, so everyone who knew him would have said. But how well can man ever know his fellow-man? There were already plenty of very different opinions being expressed concerning Ruald, sometime potter, now a Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury. It had not taken long to change their tune.
For the story of the woman found buried in the Potter’s Field had soon become common knowledge, and the talk of the district, and where should gossip look first but to the woman who had lived there fifteen years, and vanished without a word to anyone at the end of it? And where for the guilty man but to her husband, who had forsaken her for a cowl?
The woman herself, whoever she might be, was already reburied, by the abbot’s grace, in a modest corner of the graveyard, with all the rites due to her but the gift of a name. Parochially, the situation of the whole demesne of Longner was peculiar, for it had belonged earlier to the bishops of Chester, who had bestowed all their local properties, if c
lose enough, as outer and isolated dependencies of the parish of Saint Chad in Shrewsbury. But since no one knew whether this woman was a parishioner or a passing stranger, Radulfus had found it simpler and more hospitable to give her a place in abbey ground, and be done with one problem, at least, of the many she had brought with her.
But if she was finally at rest, no one else was.
“You’ve made no move to take him in charge,” said Cadfael to Hugh, in the privacy of his workshop in the herb garden, at the close of a long day. “Nor even to question him hard.”
“No need yet,” said Hugh. “He’s safe enough where he is, if ever I should need him. He’ll not move. You’ve seen for yourself, he accepts all as, at worst, a just punishment laid on him by God—oh, not necessarily for murder, simply for all the faults he finds newly in himself—or at best as a test of his faith and patience. If we all turned on him as guilty he would bear it meekly and with gratitude. Nothing would induce him to avoid. No, rather I’ll go on piecing together all his comings and goings since he entered here. If ever it reaches the case where I have cause to suspect him in good earnest, I know where to find him.”
“And as yet you’ve found no such cause?”
“No more than I had the first day, and no less. And no other woman gone from where she should be. The place, the possible time, the contention between them, the anger, all speak against Ruald, and urge that this was Generys. But Generys was well alive after he was here within the enclave, and I have found no occasion when he could have met with her again, except with Brother Paul, as both have told us. Yet is it impossible that he should, just once, have been on some errand alone, and gone to her, against all orders, for I’m sure Radulfus wanted an end to the bitterness. The frame,” said Hugh, irritated and weary, “is all too full of Ruald and Generys, and I can find no other to fit into it.”
“But you do not believe it,” Cadfael deduced, and smiled.
“I neither believe nor disbelieve. I go on looking. Ruald will keep. If tongues are wagging busily against him, he’s safe within from anything worse. And if they wag unjustly, he may take it as Christian chastisement, and wait patiently for his deliverance.”
Chapter 4
ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF OCTOBER the morning began in a grey drizzle, hardly perceptible on the face, but wetting after a while. The working folk of the Foregate went about their business hooded in sacking, and the young man trudging along the highway past the horse-fair ground had his cowl drawn well forward over his forehead, and looked very much like any other of those obliged to go out this labouring morning despite the weather. The fact that he wore the Benedictine habit excited no attention. He was taken for one of the resident brothers on some errand between the abbey and Saint Giles, and on his way back to be in time for High Mass and chapter. He had a long stride, but trod as though his sandalled feet were sore, as well as muddy, and his habit was kilted almost to the knee, uncovering muscular, well-shaped legs, smooth and young, mired to the ankles. It seemed he must have walked somewhat further than to the hospital and back, and on somewhat less frequented and seemly roads than the Foregate.
He was moderately tall, but slender and angular in the manner of youth still not quite accomplished in the management of a man’s body, as yearling colts are angular and springy, and to see such a youngster putting his feet down resolutely but tenderly, and thrusting forward with effort, struck Brother Cadfael as curious. He had looked back from the turn of the path into the garden on his way to his workshop, just as the young man turned in at the gatehouse wicket, and his eye was caught by the gait before he noticed anything else about the newcomer. Belated curiosity made him take a second glance, in time to observe that the man entering, though manifestly a brother, had halted to speak to the porter, in the manner of a stranger making civil enquiry after someone in authority. Not a brother of this house, seemingly. And now that Cadfael was paying attention, not one that he knew. One rusty black habit is much like another, especially with the cowl drawn close against the rain, but Cadfael could have identified every member of this extensive household, choir monk, novice, steward or postulant, at greater distance than across the court, and this lad was none of them. Not that there was anything strange in that, since a brother of another house in the Order might very well be sent on some legitimate business here to Shrewsbury. But there was something about this visitor that set him apart. He came on foot: official envoys from house to house more often rode. And he had come on foot a considerable distance, to judge by his appearance, shabby, footsore and weary.
It was not altogether Cadfael’s besetting sin of curiosity that made him abandon his immediate intent and cross the great court to the gatehouse. It was almost time to get ready for Mass, and because of the rain everyone who must venture out did so as briefly and quickly as possible and scurried back to shelter, so that there was no one else visible at this moment to volunteer to bear messages or escort petitioners. But it must be admitted that curiosity also had its part. He approached the pair at the gate with a bright eye and a ready tongue.
“You need a messenger, Brother? Can I serve?”
“Our brother here says he’s instructed,” said the porter, “to report himself first to the lord abbot, in accordance with his own abbot’s orders. He has matter to report, before he can take any rest.”
“Abbot Radulfus is still in his lodging,” said Cadfael, “for I left him there only a short while since. Shall I be your herald? He was alone. If it’s so grave he’ll surely see you at once.”
The young man put back the wet cowl from his head, and shook the drops that had slowly penetrated it from a tonsure growing somewhat long for conformity, and a crown covered with a strange fuzz of new growth, curly and of a dark, brownish gold. Yes, he had certainly been a long time on the way, pressing forward doggedly on foot from that distant cloister of his, wherever it might be. His face was oval, tapering slightly from a wide brow and wide-set eyes to a stubborn, probing jaw, covered at this moment by a fine golden down to match his unshaven crown. Weary and footsore he might be, but his long walk seemed to have done him no harm otherwise, for his cheeks had a healthy flush, and his eyes were of clear, light blue, and confronted Cadfael with a bright, unwavering gaze.
“I shall be glad if he will,” he said, “for I do need to get rid of the dirt of travel, but I’m charged to unburden to him first, and must do as I’m bid. And yes, it’s grave enough for the Order—and for me, though that’s of small account,” he added, shrugging off with the moisture of his cowl and scapular the present consideration of his own problems.
“He may not think it so,” said Cadfael. “But come, and we’ll put it to the test.” And he led the way briskly down the great court towards the abbot’s lodging, leaving the porter to retire into the comfort of his own lodge, out of the clinging rain.
“How long have you been on the road?” asked Cadfael of the young man limping at his elbow.
“Seven days.” His voice was low-pitched and clear, and matched every other evidence of his youth. Cadfael judged he could not yet be past twenty, perhaps not even so much.
“Sent out alone on so long an errand?” said Cadfael, marvelling.
“Brother, we are all sent out, scattered. Pardon me if I keep what I have to say, to deliver first to the lord abbot. I would as soon tell it only once, and leave all things in his hands.”
“That you may do with confidence,” Cadfael assured him, and asked nothing further. The implication of crisis was there in the words, and the first note of desperation, quietly constrained, in the young voice. At the door of the abbot’s lodging Cadfael let them both in without ceremony into the ante-room, and knocked at the half-open parlour door. The abbot’s voice, preoccupied and absent, bade him enter. Radulfus had a folder of documents before him, and a long forefinger keeping his place, and looked up only briefly to see who entered.
“Father, there is here a young brother, from a distant house of our Order, come with orders from his own abbot to rep
ort himself to you, and with what seems to be grave news. He is here at the door. May I admit him?”
Radulfus looked up with a lingering frown, abandoning whatever had been occupying him, and gave his full attention to this unexpected delivery.
“From what distant house?”
“I have not asked,” said Cadfael, “and he has not said. His instructions are to deliver all to you. But he has been on the road seven days to reach us.”
“Bring him in,” said the abbot, and pushed his parchments aside on the desk.
The young man came in, made a deep reverence to authority, and as though some seal on his mind and tongue had been broken, drew a great breath and suddenly poured out words, crowding and tumbling like a gush of blood.
“Father, I am the bearer of very ill news from the abbey of Ramsey. Father, in Essex and the Fens men are become devils. Geoffrey de Mandeville has seized our abbey to be his fortress, and cast us out, like beggars on to the roads, those of us who still live. Ramsey Abbey is become a den of thieves and murderers.”
He had not even waited to be given leave to speak, or to allow his news to be conveyed by orderly question and answer, and Cadfael had barely begun to close the door upon the pair of them, admittedly slowly and with pricked ears, when the abbot’s voice cut sharply through the boy’s breathless utterance.
“Wait! Stay with us, Cadfael. I may need a messenger in haste.” And to the boy he said crisply: “Draw breath, my son. Sit down, take thought before you speak, and let me hear a plain tale. After seven days, these few minutes will scarcely signify. Now, first, we here have had no word of this until now. If you have been so long afoot reaching us, I marvel it has not been brought to the sheriff’s ears with better speed. Are you the first to come alive out of this assault?”