by Ellis Peters
“There’s no place here for me,” he said doubtfully.
“Sister Magdalen will find a place.” And she said with sudden passionate entreaty: “Don’t leave me now!”
They came down together to the high timber fence that enclosed the cell and its gardens. Though the moon was still hidden from their sight beyond the forested uplands, its reflected light was growing with every moment; buildings, trees, bushes, the curve of the brook and cushioned strips of meadow along its banks, all emerged slowly from black obscurity into subtle modulations of grey, soon to be silvered as the moon climbed. Niall hesitated with his hand on the rope of the bell at the closed gate, such a violation it seemed to break the silence. When he did rouse himself to pull, the jangle of sound went echoing along the water, and rang back from the trees of the opposite shore. But there was only a short wait before the portress came grumbling and yawning to open the grille and peer out at them.
“Who is it? Benighted, are you?” She saw a man and a woman, both unknown to her and astray here in the forest at night, and took them for what they seemed, respectable travellers who had lost their way and found themselves in unfrequented solitudes where any shelter was more than welcome. “You want a night’s lodging?”
“My name is Judith Perle,” said Judith. “Sister Magdalen knows of me, and once offered me a place of refuge when I needed it. Sister, I need it now. And here with me is my good friend who has stood between me and danger and brought me safely here. I pray shelter through the night for him, too.”
“I’ll call Sister Magdalen,” said the portress with wise caution, and went away to do so, leaving the grille open. In a very few minutes the two returned together, and Sister Magdalen’s bright, shrewd brown eyes looked through the lattice with wide-awake interest, alert even at this hour of the night.
“You may open,” she said cheerfully. “Here is a friend, and a friend’s friend is just as welcome.”
*
In the tiny parlour, without fuss and without questions, Sister Magdalen did first things first, mulled strong wine to warm the last chill of shock and fright out of them, rolled back Niall’s bloody sleeve, bathed and bandaged the long gash in his forearm, anointed the scratch on Judith’s shoulder, and briskly repaired the long tear in her bodice and sleeve.
“It is but cobbled,” she said. “I was never a good hand with a needle. But it will serve until you’re home.” And she picked up the bowl of stained water and bore it away, leaving them for the first time alone together by candle-light, gazing earnestly and wonderingly at each other.
“And you have asked me nothing,” said Judith slowly. “Neither where I have been all these days past, nor how I came to be riding through the night to this place, in company with a man. Neither how I vanished, nor how I got my freedom again. And I owe you so much, and I have not even thanked you. But I do, from my heart! But for you I should be lying dead in the forest. He meant killing!”
“I know well enough,” said Niall steadily, “that you never would willingly have left us all in distress and dismay for you these three days. And I know that if you choose now to spare the man who put you to such straits, you do it of good intent, and in the kindness of your heart. What more do I need to know?”
“I want it buried for my own sake, too,” she said ruefully. “What is there to gain by denouncing him? And much to lose. He is no such great villain, only presumptuous and vain and foolish. He has done me no violence, no lasting wrong. Better it should all be put away. You did not recognise him?” she asked, looking at him earnestly with her penetrating grey eyes, a little bruised with tiredness.
“That was he who rode with you? No, I could not tell who he was. But if I could, I would still go with your wish. Provided it was not he,” said Niall sharply, “who came back afoot to make sure of your silence. For yes, he meant killing!”
“No, no, that was not he. He was gone, you heard him go. Besides, he would not. We had agreed, he knew I would keep my word. No, that other was some wretch living wild on the pickings of the roads. And we must warn Hugh Beringar so,” she said, “when we go back. This place is very lonely. As well he should know there are masterless men abroad here.”
She had left the great waving sheaf of her hair loose on her shoulders, ready for the sleep she sorely needed. The large, high eyelids, iris-veined and translucent, hung heavily over the grey eyes. The sheen of candle-light over her tired pallor made her look like a woman fashioned in mother-of-pearl. He looked at her, and his heart ached.
“How came it,” she asked wonderingly, “that you were there when I so needed you? I had but to cry out, and you came. It was like the grace of God, an instant mercy.”
“I was on my way home from Pulley,” said Niall, shaken and tongue-tied for a moment by the sudden sweet intensity of her voice, “and I saw—saw, heard, no, felt in my blood—when you passed by. I never thought to trouble you, only to see that you came safely wherever it was you wished to be.”
“You knew me?” she said, marvelling.
“Yes. Yes, I knew you.”
“But not the man?”
“No, not the man.”
“I think,” she said, with abrupt and reviving resolution, “that you may, you of all people, that you should. I think I want to tell everything to you, you and Sister Magdalen—even what the world must not know, even what I have promised to keep hidden.”
*
“So you see,” she said starkly, coming to the end of her story, which had taken but a few minutes to tell, “how shamelessly I am making use of you, Sister, in coming here. I have been lost and sought, hunted high and low, for three days, and tomorrow I must go back and face all those who have laboured and agonised for me, and tell them I have been here with you, that I fled all my troubles because they fell too heavily on me, and I took refuge without a word to any, here in this retreat, where you once offered me shelter from the world. Well, it will not be quite a lie, for I am here, if only for the half of this one night. But it shames me, so to use you. Yet I must go back tomorrow.” Though it was already today, she recalled through a haze of weariness and relief. “I cannot leave them longer than need be in doubt and anxiety, now I’m free to return. Or God knows I would stay here, and how gladly!”
“I see no need to fret over a scruple,” said Sister Magdalen sensibly. “If this spares both you and this idiot youth you have forgiven, and shuts the mouths of gossips, then I find it as good a way of serving as any. And the need for quietness and counsel you can declare without ever a blush, for that’s no lie. For that matter, you may come back again when you will, and stay as long as you will, as once I told you. But you’re right, it is but fair to set their minds at rest and call off the hunt. Later, when you’re rested, you shall go back and face them all, and say that you came to me when the world and the stupidity of men—saving present company, that’s understood!—bore you down to despair. But creep back afoot, no, that you shan’t. Would I let a woman go so poorly provided from a retreat with me? You shall have Mother Mariana’s mule—poor soul, she’s bedridden now, she’ll do no more riding—and I’ll ride with you, to give colour and body to all. I have an errand I can do to the lord abbot at the same time.”
“How if they ask how long I have been here?” asked Judith.
“With me beside you? They won’t ask. Or if they do, we shall not answer. Questions are as supple as willow wands,” said Sister Magdalen, rising authoritatively to lead them to the beds prepared, “it’s easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.”
Chapter 12
THE BROTHERS WERE JUST ISSUING from the church after High Mass, and the sun was climbing high into a pale blue sky, when Sister Magdalen’s little cavalcade turned in at the abbey gatehouse. This was the eve of the translation of Saint Winifred, and not even for violent deaths, disappearances and disasters can the proper routine of the church be allowed to lapse into disorder. This year there would be no solemn procession from Saint Giles, at the edge
of the town, to bring the relics once again to their resting-place on Winifred’s altar, but there would be celebratory Masses, and day-long access to her shrine for the pilgrims who had special pleas to make for her intercession. Not so many of them this year, yet the guest-hall was well filled, and Brother Denis kept busy with provision for the arrivals, as Brother Anselm was with the new music he had prepared in the saint’s honour. The novices and the children hardly realised what mortal preoccupations had convulsed town and Foregate in the recent days. The younger brothers, even those who had been closest to Brother Eluric and deeply shaken by his death, had almost forgotten him now in the cheerful prospect of a festival which brought them extra dishes at meals, and additional privileges.
Brother Cadfael was in no such case. Try as he would to keep his mind firmly on the divine office, it would stray away at every turn to worry at the problem of where Judith Perle could be hidden away now, and whether, after so many sinister happenings, the death of Bertred could really be the random and callous accident it seemed, or whether that, too, had the taint of murder about it. But if so, why murder, and by whom? There seemed no doubt that Bertred himself was the murderer of Brother Eluric, but the signs indicated that so far from being the abductor of his mistress, he had been probing that ill deed for himself, and had intended to be her deliverer, and exploit the favour to the limit afterwards. No question but the watchman was telling the truth as far as he knew it, Bertred had fallen from the hatch, roused the mastiff, and been hunted to the river-bank, with a single clout on the head to speed his flight. Yes, but only one, and the body that was drawn out of the river on the other side showed a second, worse injury, though neither in itself could have been fatal. How if someone had helped him into the water with that second blow, after the watchman had called off his dog?
If that was a possibility, who could it have been but the abductor, alarmed by Bertred’s interference and intent on covering up his own crime?
And Vivian Hynde was away helping his father with the flocks at Forton, was he? Well, perhaps! Not for long! If he did not ride into the arms of the watch at the town gates before noon, Hugh would be sending an armed guard to fetch him.
Cadfael had arrived at this precise point as they emerged into the sunlight of the morning, and beheld Sister Magdalen just riding in at the gatehouse on her elderly dun-coloured mule, at its usual leisurely and determined foot-pace. She rode with the same unhurried competence with which she did everything, without fuss or pretence, and looked about her as she entered with a bright, observant eye. Close to her stirrup walked the miller from the Ford, her trusted ally in all things. Sister Magdalen would never be short of a man to do what she wanted.
But there was another mule following, a taller beast, and white, and as he cleared the arch of the gateway they saw that his rider, also, was a woman, and not in the Benedictine habit, but gowned in dark green, and with a scarf over her hair. A tall, slender woman, erect and graceful in the saddle, the carriage and balance of her head arrestingly dignified, and suddenly, startlingly, familiar.
Cadfael checked so suddenly that the brother behind collided with him, and stumbled. At the head of their company the abbot had also halted abruptly, staring in wonder.
So she had come back, of her own will, at her own time, free, composed, not greatly changed, to confound them all. Judith Perle reined her mule alongside Magdalen’s, and there halted. She was paler than Cadfael remembered her. By nature her skin was clear and translucent as pearl, but now with a somewhat dulled whiteness, and her eyelids were a little swollen and heavy from want of sleep, and blanched and bluish like snow. But also there was a calm and serenity upon her, though without joy. She had the mastery of herself, she looked back into the astonished and questioning eyes that devoured her, and did not lower her own.
John Miller went to lift her down, and she laid her hands on his shoulders and set foot to the cobbles of the great court with a lightness that did not quite conceal her weariness. Abbot Radulfus had got his breath back, and started forward to meet her as she came towards him, bent the knee to him deeply, and stooped to kiss the hand he extended to her.
“Daughter,” said Radulfus, shaken and glad, “how I rejoice to see you restored here, whole and well. We have been in great trouble for you.”
“So I have learned, Father,” she said in a low voice, “and I take it to my blame. God knows it was never my wish that anyone should be in distress of mind for me, and I am sorry to have put you and the lord sheriff and so many good men to such a trouble and expense on my behalf. I will make amends as best I may.”
“Oh, child, pains spent in goodwill require no payment. If you are come back to your place safe and well, what else matters? But how does this come about? Where have you been all this time?”
“Father,” she said, drawing breath in a moment’s hesitation, “you see no harm has come to me. It was rather I who fled from a burden that had become too hard to bear alone. That I never said word to any you must excuse, but my need, my compulsion, was sudden and urgent. I needed a place of quietness and peace, and a time for thought, all that Sister Magdalen once promised me if ever I needed to shut out the world for a little while, until my heart could stand it. I fled to her, and she has not failed me.”
“And you are just come from Godric’s Ford?” said Radulfus, marvelling. “All this while that you have been thought lost, you were safe and quiet there? Well, I thank God for it! And no news of this turmoil we were in here ever came to your ears there at the Ford?”
“Never a word, Father Abbot,” said Sister Magdalen promptly. She had lighted down and approached without haste, smoothing the skirt of her habit from the creases of riding with plump, shapely, ageing hands. “We live out of the world there, and seldom feel the want of it. News is slow to reach us. Since I was last here, not a soul has come our way from Shrewsbury until late last night, when a man from the Foregate happened by. So here I have brought Judith home, to put an end to all this doubt, and set all minds at rest.”
“As hers, I hope,” said the abbot, closely studying the pale but calm face, “is now at rest, after those stresses that drove her into hiding. Three days is not long, to bring about the healing of a heart.”
She looked up steadily into his face with her wide grey eyes, and very faintly smiled. “I thank you, Father, and I thank God, I have regained my courage.”
“I am well sure,” said the abbot warmly, “that you could not have placed yourself in better hands, and I, too, thank God that all our fears for you can be so happily put away.”
In the brief, profound silence the long file of brothers, halted perforce at the abbot’s back, shifted and craned and peered to get a good look at this woman who had been sought as lost, and even whispered about with sly undertones of scandal, and now returned immaculate in the blameless company of the sub-prioress of a Benedictine cell, effectively silencing comment, if not speculation, and confronting the world with unassailable composure and dignity. Even Prior Robert had so far forgotten himself as to stand and stare, instead of waving the brothers authoritatively away through the cloister to their proper duties.
“Will you not have your beasts cared for here,” the abbot invited, “and take some rest and refreshment? And I will send at once to the castle and let the lord sheriff know that you are back with us safe and sound. For you should see him as soon as possible, and explain your absence to him as you have here to me.”
“So I intend, Father,” said Judith, “but I must go home. My aunt and cousin and all my people will still be fretting for me, I must go at once and show myself, and put an end to their anxiety. I’ll send to the castle immediately to let Hugh Beringar know, and he may come to me or send for me to come to him, as soon as he pleases. But we could not pass by into the town without first coming to inform you.”
“That was considerate, and I am grateful. But, Sister, I trust you will be my guest while you are here?”
“Today, I think,” said Sister Magdalen, “
I must go with Judith and see her safely restored to her family, and be her advocate with the sheriff, should she need one. Authority may be less indulgent over time and labour wasted than you are, Father. I shall stay with her at least overnight. But tomorrow I hope to have some talk with you. I’ve brought with me the altar frontal Mother Mariana has been working on since she took to her bed. Her hands still have all their skill, I think you will be pleased with it. But it’s packed carefully away in my saddle-roll, I would rather not delay to undo it now. If I might borrow Brother Cadfael, to walk up into the town with us, I think perhaps Hugh Beringar would be glad to have him in council when we meet, and he could bring down the altar-cloth to you afterwards.”
By this time Abbot Radulfus knew her well enough to know that there was always a reason for any request she might make. He looked round for Cadfael, who was already making his way out from the ranks of the brothers.
“Yes, go with our sister. You have leave for as long as you may be needed.”
“With your countenance, Father,” said Cadfael readily, “and if Sister Magdalen agrees, I could go straight on to the castle and take the message to Hugh Beringar, after we have brought Mistress Perle home. He’ll have men still out round the countryside, the sooner he can call them off, the better.”
“Yes, agreed! Go, then!” He led the way back to where the mules stood waiting, with John Miller solid and passive beside them. The file of brothers, released from the porch, went its dutiful way, not without several glances over shoulders to watch the two women mount and depart. While they were about it, Radulfus drew Cadfael aside and said quietly: “If the news came so laggardly to Godric’s Ford, there may still be some things that have happened here that she does not know, and not all will be pleasant hearing. This man of hers who is dead, worse, guilty…”
“I had thought of it,” said Cadfael as softly. “She shall know, before she ever reaches home.”